On the ball: Short-term consequences of movement fakes

In competitive situations, humans sometimes use fake actions. Fake actions are carried out to pretend a certain action goal, which however is not actually pursued, such as pump fakes in basketball, or drop shots in tennis. Here, we studied the short-term consequences of producing or observing fakes on the planning and detection of subsequent fake actions. Two players participated in a game, an attacker and a defender. Attackers had to either throw a ball into a target basket of the defender, or to mimic such a throw without actually throwing. Defenders had to discriminate between real throws and faked throws. Participants changed the roles of attacker and defender, and switched between real and faked throws randomly, on a trial-by-trial basis. We found that the (self-)observation of a fake action facilitated the detection of subsequent fake actions of opponents, but did not facilitate the subsequent planning of own fake actions. We conjecture that previous encounters of fake actions help to focus on the movement aspects that are most diagnostic for such fake actions. As a potential practical consequence, we recommend to not generate multiple fake actions in sports within a short time, to prevent potential short-term perceptual adaptation effects of defenders.