Stepovers and Signal Detection: Response Sensitivity and Bias in the Differentiation of Genuine and Deceptive Football Actions.

Robin C Jackson,Bruce Abernethy,Kelly J Ashford,Hayley Barton

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02043

Abstract

The ability to differentiate genuine and deceptive actions was examined using a combination of spatial and temporal occlusion to examine sensitivity to lower body, upper body, and full body sources of visual information. High-skilled and low-skilled association football players judged whether a player genuinely intended to take the ball to the participant’s left or right or intended to step over the ball then take it in the other direction. Signal detection analysis was used to calculate measures of sensitivity (d′) in differentiating genuine and deceptive actions and bias (c) toward judging an action to be genuine or deceptive. Analysis revealed that high-skilled players had higher sensitivity than low-skilled players and this was consistent across all spatial occlusion conditions. Low-skilled players were more biased toward judging actions to be genuine. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves revealed that accuracy on deceptive trials in the lower body and full body conditions most accurately classified participants as high-skilled or low-skilled. The results highlight the value of using signal detection analysis in studies of deceptive actions. They suggest that information from the lower body or upper body was sufficient for differentiating genuine and deceptive actions and that global information concurrently derived from these sources was not necessary to support the expert advantage.

Highlights

The ability to judge the intentions of an opponent using advance visual information confers an advantage in many competitive sport encounters (Mann et al, 2007)
The aim of the present study is to test whether concurrent use of lower and upper body sources of information is necessary for judging deceptive intent in a common deceptive action: the football stepover
We found clear differences between the performance of high-skilled and low-skilled performers that were consistent across the full-video and point-light tests, highlighting the importance of kinematic information in anticipation and judgment of deceptive intent (Abernethy et al, 2001, 2008)

Summary

Introduction

The ability to judge the intentions of an opponent using advance visual information confers an advantage in many competitive sport encounters (Mann et al, 2007). The weight of evidence supports a clear advantage for high-skilled over low-skilled performers in using kinematic information to judge deceptive intent. This has been shown in studies of deceptive ‘sidestep’ actions (Jackson et al, 2006; Brault et al, 2012; Mori and Shimada, 2013), football penalty kicks (Smeeton and Williams, 2012), football ‘stepovers’ (Bishop et al, 2013; Wright et al, 2013; Wright and Jackson, 2014), and discriminations between genuine and deceptive actions in volleyball (Güldenpenning et al, 2013), handball (Cañal-Bruland and Schmidt, 2009), and basketball (Sebanz and Shiffrar, 2009)

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Discussion

Conclusion