Science

Scientists find reason behind split-second sporting disputes


Whether it’s rushing to push the buzzer on a quiz show or working out who last touched a basketball before it left the court, players often end up squabbling over moments that turn on milliseconds. But now scientists say there is more to the disputes than sour grapes or angling for an advantage.

Researchers have found that when two players press a button simultaneously, they both judge their own action as having taken place about 50 milliseconds before that of their opponent.

The upshot is that even if two Jeopardy! contestants hit their buzzers at the same time, each can believe they got there first.

The authors say they hope the study will help to shed light on why people interpret the same events differently.

“I think there is an objective truth underlying everything, but whether or not we are able to experience that is something that’s completely different,” said Ty Tang, first author of the study from Arizona State University. “And so we should try our best to be understanding and just be more open-minded and realise that our way of experiencing the world isn’t the only way.”

Writing in the journal Science Advances, Tang and co-author Michael McBeath report how they made their discovery by putting 16 participants in pairs, sitting them across from each other with a partition obscuring them from each other’s view, and asking them to tap a sensor on the other person’s hand when a light flashed. Participants then reported who they thought was the first to tap.

After each pair repeated the task 50 times, the researchers examined the results, finding that even if participants tapped at the same time, in 67% of cases they thought they had tapped first. Further analysis showed taps that would have been deemed simultaneous by a player did not, in fact, happen at the same time: their own tap occurred about 50 milliseconds after their opponent’s tap.

Similar results were found when the team repeated the experiment in two different setups. In one, 25 participants were individually pitted against a mechanical device that touched their hand, while in the other another 25 participants attempted to tap a sensor in response to a flash of light before a click sounded.

The team say the findings could be down us perceiving our own actions in near “real time” but the brain taking longer to process external actions – meaning they are perceived to happen later than they actually do. That, said Tang, could either be because the actions of other people or devices are less predictable than our own, or because less attention is being paid to what others are doing.

However he said it could also be – at least in part – that players fail to appreciate the time that passes between them making an action and it having the desired effect, for example pressing a buzzer and it making a sound.

Tang added that the difference in perceived timing of one’s own actions and those of others might differ depending on the task in hand, and how much attention individuals pay to a situation.

Dr Michael Hiley, an expert in sports biomechanics and motor control at Loughborough University, said the results made sense. “We have made a decision prior to the event and sent commands to execute the movement in advance, so this may bias our perception,” he said, adding that we also compare the outcomes of our movements with what we predicted.

“If the feedback is different to what we expected, [for example] both players touching the ball, then we may come to the conclusion that the other player interfered with the ball,” he said. “That is, the other player must have caused the ball’s final movement as it does not correspond to the planned outcome.”



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