Trust my face: Cognitive factors of head fakes in sports.

Abstract

In many competitive sports, players try to deceive their opponents about their behavioral intentions by using specific body movements or postures called fakes. For example, fakes are performed in basketball when a player gazes in one direction but passes or shoots the ball in another direction to avert efficient defense actions. The present study aimed to identify the cognitive processes that underlie the effects of fakes. The paradigmatic situation studied was the head fake in basketball. Observers (basketball novices) had to decide as quickly as possible whether a basketball player would pass a ball to the left or to the right. The player's head and gaze were oriented in the direction of an intended pass or in the opposite direction (i.e., a head fake). Responding was delayed for incongruent compared to congruent directions of the player's gaze and the pass. This head fake effect was independent of response speed, the presence of a fake in the immediately preceding trial, and practice with the task. Five further experiments using additive-factors logic and locus-of-slack logic revealed a perceptual rather than motor-related origin of this effect: Turning the head in a direction opposite the pass direction appears to hamper the perceptual encoding of pass direction, although it does not induce a tendency to move in the direction of the head's orientation. The implications of these results for research on deception in sports and their relevance for sports practice are discussed.

Control over the processing of the opponent’s gaze direction in basketball experts

“…Two aspects of the data suggest that the head-fake effect originates from the perceptual processing of conflicting information of the relevant (pass direction) and irrelevant (gaze direction) stimulus features, but not from response selection and motor-priming effects (Kunde et al 2011, Experiments 2-6). First, manipulations of the perceptual quality of the stimuli did have an impact on the fake effect, whereas manipulations of the type and compatibility of motor responses (typically ascribed to response selection) did not.…”

“…Head fakes in sports were examined in a paradigmatic way by Kunde, Weigelt and colleagues (Alhaj Ahmad Alaboud, Steggemann, Klein-Soetebier, Kunde, & Weigelt, 2012;Kunde, Skirde, & Weigelt, 2011). These authors used the head fake in basketball as their standard model of a deceptive action.…”

“…First, manipulations of the perceptual quality of the stimuli did have an impact on the fake effect, whereas manipulations of the type and compatibility of motor responses (typically ascribed to response selection) did not. Second, high temporal overlap of the fake-response task with another capacitylimited task tended to reduce the effect as compared to low overlap, which according to the locus-of-slack logic also suggests a perceptual origin (for more details see Kunde et al 2011). Therefore, Kunde et al (2011) argued that head fakes are processed automatically during stimulus encoding and that the resulting S-S type interference cannot be actively suppressed by the observer, delaying all other processes following thereafter, such as response selection and response programming.…”

“…Second, high temporal overlap of the fake-response task with another capacitylimited task tended to reduce the effect as compared to low overlap, which according to the locus-of-slack logic also suggests a perceptual origin (for more details see Kunde et al 2011). Therefore, Kunde et al (2011) argued that head fakes are processed automatically during stimulus encoding and that the resulting S-S type interference cannot be actively suppressed by the observer, delaying all other processes following thereafter, such as response selection and response programming. Although the precise mechanisms of the head-fake effect have not yet been identified, two hypotheses can explain the perceptual processing locus: First, the effectiveness of head fakes in basketball may be based on some kind of an input selection problem, where it is harder to discriminate between the relevant stimulus feature (pass direction) and the irrelevant stimulus feature (gaze direction).…”

“…Previous studies on head fakes relied on the performance of non-athletes (Kunde et al 2011) or athletes without domainspecific expertise (Alhaj Ahmad Alaboud et al 2012, in press). Therefore, it is still unknown whether and how athletic expertise shapes the impact of head fakes within the domain of expertise.…”