
Out of bounds: Why basketball players believe they weren’t last to touch ball - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/out-of-bounds-why-basketball-players-believe-they-werent-last-to-touch-ball/
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jstimpfle
Slightly related - when I run a cheap command in xterm (bitmap fonts) on X11
with a plain and fast window manager (no compositing) I often have this weird
sensation that the output appears before I've actually hit the return key.

It might be just due to the surprise given how much software has bad
latencies, but it might also be that the processing of the sensoral inputs
from my fingers hitting the key takes longer than the visual response from
something appearing on the screen.

~~~
eximius
If you have a switch that activates before the key is fully depressed (i.e.,
keycap on board), then in a very real sense it might be the case!

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nkozyra
I think there's interesting stuff here but it's a stretch to extend this small
sample size study to an effect that is probably as much gamesmanship as
temporal perception.

Anecdotally most of the time when a ball goes out of bounds both parties have
a good sense of last touch and it's often validated by the third parties. NBA
players are ultimately trying to retain possession for their team and can make
a situation seem more convincing. Same can apply to NFL players thinking
they've made a catch our any number of split second mental evaluations. The
bias would be resolved by the time there would be a reaction.

In other words I believe in the abstract the temporal bias but see no reason
to apply it to out of bounds calls in the NBA other than the temporal bias of
click bait :)

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everdev
> Anecdotally most of the time when a ball goes out of bounds both parties
> have a good sense of last touch and it's often validated by the third
> parties

In friendly pickup games it's extremely rare to see any confusion about who
touched it last.

As competition heats up it's more common (but still rare) and almost
exclusively limited to those who are playing most aggressively /
competitively.

I'd put money on this phenomenon bring related to the desire to win. We see
this in politics, arguments and other sports calls (that don't involve touch,
like if a ball touched a line) as well where the desire to win seems to create
a conscious or subconscious blind spot that allows us to be extremely
confident in things that would benefit us regardless of the information
provided to us.

And again I wouldn't be surprised if this phenomenon increases or decreases
based on how badly we want to win.

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gmueckl
Don't professional games generally have a faster pace? If so, that might be a
factor.

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everdev
Yes, but you can see this with kids competing too. Their desire to win seems
inversely proportional to their honesty or rational observation of a call, to
the point where it seems like they believe their slanted viewpoint and beyond
just trying to manipulate the ref.

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nl
_" People are generally accurate in the real-time perception of their own
actions, like hitting and catching a baseball, but we need a little extra time
to process something unplanned, like an unexpected tap on the shoulder," he
said. "When something is unexpected, there is a slight perceptual delay while
the brain figures it out."_

How completely fascinating.

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have_faith
You should look into pattern interruptions, like the handshake pattern
interruption Derren Brown uses occassionally. What happens to the brain in
moments of confusion is an interesting subject and apparently very
exploitable.

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dasil003
Not buying this. Players have an extremely keen sense of the mechanics and
physics of the ball and what force they are imparting to it. Sure there are
borderline cases where the touch was close to simultaneous in the same
direction or there was a glancing blow they didn't perceive, but reordering of
events imparting different forces to the same object? This is a very different
question from the perception of two independent actions that the researchers
measured.

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jackschultz
> For their first experiment, Tang and McBeath paired up the volunteers and
> had them sit across from each other at a table, with a barrier between them
> so one could not see the other. Every time a light flashed at random
> intervals, the subjects would touch a sensor on the back of the other
> person's left hand as quickly as they could. Then each one would push a
> button indicating if they thought they had touched the other person's hand
> first.

When a ball is sent out of bounds, it can glance off of you, and them may or
may not touch the opponent before ending up out of bounds. You can feel it
hitting you, but don't feel the opposite. Which is unlike the experiment where
your hand is touched and you touch the opponent's hand. How in the world are
those comparable?

> Granted, this was a small, highly selective sample size: sixteen
> undergraduate students (11 females and five males), asked to repeat the task
> 50 times ... "Even with our relatively small sample size, we still find this
> a very high effect size. There's a very low probability that this would
> happen by chance."

A great example of what can be an interesting topic to discuss, but in no way
means anything.

> We have identified what may be a principal cause of arguments in ball games.

Additionally, and more importantly, we don't know whether or not the players
arguing for possession actually believe it went off of the opponent, and why
they believe it went out off the opponent. So many times the arguments in the
NBA are to get an edge in the future, in the way of a makeup call, or a
general sense of getting the refs to feel they owe their team a call.

Side note, I love watching the NBA, and unlike most people, the refs are
incredibly good with all the continuous action.

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WaltPurvis
As others have noted, but somewhat obliquely: Basketball players almost always
know for certain whether or not they were the last person to touch the ball
before it went out of bounds, they just pretend like it wasn't them to try to
fool the ref into giving their team possession. Strangely enough, this is
generally regarded as harmless "gamesmanship" even though it's essentially
cheating, or at a minimum unsportsmanlike.

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RandyRanderson
Possibly related but sometimes things _appear_ to happen instantaneously or
even before we, say, click a mouse button. This can be caused by the delays
our bodies/brain put in place to make the world consistent. See:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/05/18/104183551/t...](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/05/18/104183551/the-
secret-advantage-of-being-short)

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Tempest1981
Note that our nervous system isn't instantaneous. That could be a factor in
the simultaneous-touch test that was done.

I found this online, but couldn't find the original source: "The average
reaction time for humans is 0.25 seconds to a visual stimulus, 0.17 for an
audio stimulus, and 0.15 seconds for a touch stimulus."

Our brain probably tries to compensate for this, but inaccurately?

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atlantacrackers
Somehow, this impacts Doc Rivers and the Clips more than 5x anyone else in the
league.

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exabrial
Next can we identify the reason for flops? In the last 10 years it has become
a terrible component of the game, so much so I've stopped watching.

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wolco
The flop or the charge? A charge is getting in position and having the
offensive player tun into you.

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exabrial
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCfdMg5c29o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCfdMg5c29o)

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willyg123
Not mentioned in the article: Basketball players have an obvious _incentive_
to argue their opponent touched the ball last.

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briefcomment
It is mentioned as an obvious alternative, however briefly.

"What would previously have been marked up to deceit or misjudgment has now
been brought into the realm of basic neuroscience."

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lonelappde
This didn't get traction when Tomte first submitted in April. Strange, I
thought I read discussion about it at the time.

