Out of bounds: Why basketball players believe they weren’t last to touch ball | Hacker News Reader

Out of bounds: Why basketball players believe they weren’t last to touch ball

arstechnica.com

40 pointsTomte25 comments

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.

That’s how I perceive it, too

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!

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 :)

> 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.

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

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.

You may be right that this is a stretch to apply to any one phenomenon, but from my studies on conciousness the findings of this paper are consistent with most of what I’ve seen. Basically the brain sort of tells us stories constantly and consciousness is more of an after effect. There was an explosion in the field of neuroscience with the high avalability of FMRI devices. The big experiment that seems to be repeatable is telling someone to make a desicion while watching their brain, and the watcher could predict the decision ahead before the decider had signaled their decision. Some experiments seemed to go further and show the brain made the decision before the person was aware of their decision.

"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.

If you find this interesting I'd reccomend looking into predictive coding. The Slatestarcodex on the subject are great.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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?

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

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.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCfdMg5c29o

One of the sportscasters jokingly calls for "an immediate $5000 fine" for floppers. And more recently, a $5000 fine if more than 1 player simultaneously does the finger-twirl gesture for instant replay. I would add, any player who yells "and 1" after every layup.

I hate to see players like Harden praised for "knowing how to get to the line". That shouldn't be a rewardable skill.

Edit: The NBA implemented a fine in 2013, but it is very rarely enforced.

ha, i remember that, it was jeff van gundy who said it. he's a contrarian like that.

i agree about harden. he's an amazing player, but i'm turned off by his foul-baiting tactics.

pat beverly was fined for flopping recently: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2864007-clippers-patrick...

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

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."

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

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