Strategic adaptations to deceptive actions in sports: The anticipation-response-inhibition-accuracy trade-off

We investigated the impact of local (i.e., trial-to-trial sequence effects) and global (i.e., experiment-wide fake-frequency effects) context information on response inhibition for the pump fake in basketball, using a basketball-specific anticipation-response-inhibition task. In the go-trials, a basketball player performed a jump shot and participants were asked to respond exactly when the ball leaves the attacker's fingertips. In the stop-trials, a simulated pump fake was presented by pausing the video at a variable point in time before the ball left the attacker's fingertips and then rewinding the video until the ball was back at hip height. In the case of a stop-trial, participants were instructed to inhibit their response. The fake frequency varied, with 25 %, 50 %, or 75 % pump fakes per block. The stop-signal interval was adjusted by a staircase-tracking algorithm, where the stop-signal interval either decreased or increased when participants could or could not inhibit the response. Participant's response-inhibition performance was determined by the point of no return (PNR) and their response-precision performance by the constant error (CE). The results revealed a new psychological effect, which we term anticipation-response-inhibition-accuracy trade-off. Accordingly, participants either traded off response inhibition for response precision or (vice versa) traded off response precision for response inhibition. This new effect describes the strategic response adaptation to local and global context information and provides a new dimension to anticipatory action control. It has important implications for understanding how individuals balance response precision and response inhibition in dynamic and context-dependent environments.