Production Costs of Head-Fakes in Basketball - Influencing Factors in the individual setting and in the interaction scenario

Studies of the first funding period showed that producing a pass with a head fake takes more time than producing a pass without a head fake. This so called fake-production cost reflects response-response incompatibility-costs, which occur during the stage of response selection. In our basketball-specific setting, response selection is carried out associatively, that is, pre-determined stimuli (acoustic signals) are translated into corresponding reactions (i.e., pass with or without a head fake, to the right or to the left side), according to specific rules. The key question of our research project refers to the factors, which affect the process of response selection. On the one hand, we plan to investigate these factors in an individual setting of a performing actor (i.e., the producer of a head fake), and on the other hand, in a social-interaction scenario with an actor and a re-actor (i.e., the observer of a head fake). The central question for the individual setting refers to the required cognitive capacity, which we manipulate through practice, try-harder instructions, and expertise. The core question of the interaction scenario refers to ideo-motor processes, which might affect response selection when performing a head fake.

Besides, we aim to pick up two research questions for the second funding period referring to the head-fake effect, which, to our feeling, were not sufficiently resolved in the first funding period. First, we suggest that the origin of the head-fake effect cannot solely be explained with a stimulus-stimulus conflict at the perceptual processing stage. Rather, we think that additional motor priming effects take also part when observing a head fake, which we want to validate with measures of the shifts of the center of mass with a force plate. Second, we aim to follow up the surprising finding of a decreased head-fake effect under conditions of cognitive load. Accordingly, we want to gain further evidence that cognitive load specifically affects the processing of the head fake in basketball. That is, cognitive load might either impair the processing of the gaze direction (decreased head-fake effect) or the pass direction (increased head-fake effect).