Abstract
Basketball players sometimes claim to know when their shot is good, even before it goes in. This is likely because shooter proprioception can help determine shot outcome, even before their eyes confirm it. This phenomenon, however, has not been systematically explored for collegiate and recreational shooters. This study compared how well collegiate shooters and recreational shooters could predict outcomes of their own free throws without seeing the shot result. Forty collegiate and recreational shooters shot standard free throws while wearing liquid-crystal occlusion glasses that activated to occlude vision immediately following ball release during each shot. After each shot, shooters verbally predicted shot outcome as “in” or “out”, and predicted results were compared with actual outcomes. As anticipated, for made shots, collegiate shooters more accurately predicted their own shots than recreational shooters. However, unexpectedly, for missed shots, collegiate shooters were worse than recreational shooters and were even significantly worse than chance. Further analysis found that collegiate shooters exhibited a significantly higher bias toward predicting their shots as “in”. Understanding how shooters of different skill levels perceive their own shot could inform future training strategies for improving shooter accuracy.
Highlights
Free throws are an important part of basketball as they can determine game outcome [1,2]
Known as success prediction, is the ability to predict the outcome of an event before receiving knowledge of results (KR) and is vital for decision making in sports [16]
Collegiate shooters predicted worse than recreational shooters, but they predicted worse than chance, meaning a simple coin toss at 50% would have been a better predictor of the collegiate shooters’ missed shots than the collegiate shooters themselves which were only correct 41% of the time (Table 1)
Summary
Free throws are an important part of basketball as they can determine game outcome [1,2]. Previous research has explored optimal ball trajectory [2,3,4,5] and optimal shooter kinematics [6,7,8], as well as psychological factors related to basketball shooting [9,10,11,12] and theories for better coaching [1,13,14,15]. Action anticipation has been shown to be more pronounced in skilled athletes than novice athletes. Aglioti et al [17] showed that skilled shooters predict free throw outcomes with greater accuracy than novices when watching video clips of the free throws. Wu et al [18] found that skilled
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