Who Really Hit the Basketball out of Bounds? (VIDEO)
Caption
The shot clock reads 5, and a win forces a game 7. Two hands outstretched as the players - one in royal blue and yellow, the other black - hurtle towards the edge of the court. The ball sails out of bounds, and the play ends. Both players insist to the referee that the other touched the ball last. The crowd goes wild.
When a basketball is knocked out of bounds, it matters who touched it last. Determining which player touched last is often not so simple but can have consequences, especially during playoff basketball. Researchers Ty Tang and Mike McBeath from the ASU Department of Psychology have found people consistently experience their own actions as happening 50 milliseconds earlier than other people's actions. This self-centered bias in touch perception provides a new quantifiable example of how experience does not always match reality.
Credit
Robert Ewing, ASU
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