Abstract
The ability to detect deceptive intent within actions is a crucial element of skill across many tasks. Evidence suggests that deceptive actions may rely on the use of superficial visual information to hide the basic kinematic information which specifies the actor’s intent. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the ability of observers to anticipate deceptive actions could be enhanced by training which removes superficial visual information. Novice badminton players (n = 36) were allocated to one of three groups who performed perceptual training over 3 days, with the efficacy of training assessed using tests of anticipatory skill conducted at pre-test, post-test, and a 1-week retention test. During training, participants watched a series of non-deceptive badminton shots performed by actors, with the footage manipulated to display either (i) low spatial-frequency information only (low-SF training group; blurring to remove superficial information); (ii) high spatial-frequency information only (high-SF training group; an ‘edge detector’ to highlight superficial information); or (iii) normal vision (normal-SF group). Participants were asked to anticipate the direction of the shuttle when footage was occluded at the moment of racquet-shuttle contact. In the post-test, response accuracy (RA) when viewing deceptive trials was higher for the low-SF training group when compared to the normal-SF (control) training group (p = 0.005), with the difference retained in the retention test (p = 0.020). High-SF training resulted in greater performance at post-test (p = 0.038) but not retention (p = 0.956). The analysis of gaze provided some explanation for the findings, with the low-SF training group spending more time after training fixating on the location of racquet-shuttle contact than did the normal training group (p = 0.028). The findings demonstrate that training which conveys only the basic kinematic movements visible in low-SF information may be effective in learning to ‘see-through’ deceptive intent.
Highlights
The ability to identify deceptive intent can be crucial in a variety of social contexts (Cañal-Bruland, 2017)
Statistical Analyses In accordance with our aim to determine whether perceptual training would improve the ability to perceive action outcomes in the presence of deceptive intent, our analysis focuses on changes in response accuracy (RA) and response time (RT) when viewing deceptive trials
Deceptive Trials A borderline interaction – with large effect size – between training group and test-time [training group × test occasion, F(4,60) = 2.12, p = 0.09, η2p = 0.124] suggested that changes in the RA of the participants differed according to their type of training [main effect for training group, F(2,30) = 3.65, p = 0.038, FIGURE 2 | Mean response accuracy and response time for deceptive (A,B) and non-deceptive (C,D) trials
Summary
The ability to identify deceptive intent can be crucial in a variety of social contexts (Cañal-Bruland, 2017). Deceptive intent is conveyed during physical interactions when observing the actions embodied within the movements of others (Jackson et al, 2006) This is the case in a variety of sports, where deception is often used by athletes to fool their opponents into making an incorrect judgment about that athlete’s true action intentions (Cañal-Bruland and Schmidt, 2009). Runeson and Frykholm (1983) were the first to investigate and report the ability of observers to detect deceptive intentions when watching others perform a motor task Participants in their seminal study watched point-light displays of actors who lifted boxes onto a table, and in a subsequent experiment, watched actors who in some cases attempted to deceive observers by pretending that the box they were lifting was heavier than it was. Given that the point-light displays conveyed only very basic information about the underlying kinematic pattern of body movements of the actors, these results highlight that information available from the basic kinematic signature of the actor can be sufficient for even novice observers to perceive the genuine action intentions of both deceptive and non-deceptive actions
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