Somatosensory Perception Of Basketball Shoe Mass

Abstract

Athletic shoe manufacturers have been marketing increasingly “lightweight” shoes, though it is unclear how well people can perceive shoe mass through their feet. PURPOSE: To determine how accurately subjects could perceive the relative masses of five different, unaltered basketball shoes models using either their feet or their hands. METHODS: Seventeen males (23.8 ± 9.4 years, 180 ± 3.8 cm, 89.2 ± 12.6 kg) participated. The five basketball shoe models ranged in mass from 345-500 g. For foot perception, subjects were blindly fitted with the shoes, allowed one minute to wear the shoes, and then ranked the shoes’ masses first individually using verbal analogue scales (VAS) and second collectively using verbal relative rankings. For hand perception, subjects blindly hefted the shoes and then physically ordered them based on perceived mass. RESULTS: Subjects were 20% accurate in the foot task and 88% accurate in the hand task based on squared residuals. Accuracy outcomes in the present study were not statistically different from accuracy outcomes from identical mass perception tasks using running shoes in either men (shoe mass range 220-360 g) or women (shoe mass range 160-290 g), for either foot or hand perceptual tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with previous studies, subjects perceived relative basketball shoe masses poorly when wearing the shoes but well when holding them. It appears that mass perceptual abilities are comparable regardless of whether running shoes (with overall lighter masses) or basketball shoes (with overall heavier masses) are used.