The "hot hand" belief in sports refers to the conviction that a player has a higher chance of making a shot after two or three successful shots than after two or three misses (resulting in "streaks"). This belief is usually considered a cognitive fallacy, although it has been conjectured that in basketball the defense will attack a "hot" player and prevent streaks from occurring. To address this argument, we provide the first study on the hot hand in volleyball, where the net limits direct defensive counterstrategies, meaning that streaks can more likely emerge if a player is hot. We first establish that athletes believe in the hot hand in volleyball (Study 1A). Analyzing the top 26 first-division players, we then show that streaks do exist for half of the players (Study 1B). Coaches can detect players' performance variability and use it to make strategic decisions (Study 2A). Playmakers are also sensitive to streaks and rely on them when deciding to whom to allocate the ball (Study 2B). We conclude that for volleyball the hot hand exists, coaches and playmakers are able to detect it, and playmakers tend to use it "adaptively," which results in more hits for a team.

Age-related decline may not be as pronounced in complex activities as it is in basic cognitive processes, but ability deterioration with age is difficult to deny. However, studies disagree on whether age is kinder to more able people than it is to their less able peers. In this article, we investigated the "age is kinder to the more able" hypothesis by using a chess database that contains activity records for both beginners and world-class players. The descriptive data suggested that the skill function across age captures the 3 phases as described in Simonton's model of career trajectories: initial rise to the peak of performance, postpeak decline, and eventual stabilization of decline. We therefore modeled the data with a linear mixed-effect model using the cubic function that captures 3 phases. The results show that age may be kind to the more able in a subtler manner than has previously been assumed. After reaching the peak at around 38 years, the more able players deteriorated more quickly. Their decline, however, started to slow down at around 52 years, earlier than for less able players (57 years). Both the decline and its stabilization were significantly influenced by activity. The more players engaged in playing tournaments, the less they declined and the earlier they started to stabilize. The best experts may not be immune to aging, but their previously acquired expertise and current activity enable them to maintain high levels of skill even at an advanced age.

While inattentional blindness is a modern classic in attention and perception research, analogous phenomena of inattentional deafness have been widely neglected. We here present the first investigation of inattentional deafness in and with music under controlled experimental conditions. Inattentional deafness in music is defined as the inability to consciously perceive an unexpected musical stimulus when attention is focused on a certain facet of the piece. Participants listened to a modification of the first 1'50″ of Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra; while the control group just listened, the experimental group had to count the number of timpani beats. An e-guitar solo served as the unexpected event. In Study 1, experimental data from n = 115 participants were analyzed. Non-musicians were compared with musicians to investigate the impact of expertise. In Study 2 (n = 47), the scope of the inattentional deafness effect was investigated with a more salient unexpected stimulus. Results demonstrate an inattentional deafness effect under dynamic musical conditions. Quite unexpectedly, the effect was structurally equivalent even for musicians. Our findings clearly show that sustained inattentional deafness exists in the musical realm, in close correspondence to inattentional blindness with dynamic visual stimuli.

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27In recent years, numerous studies were published on the reaction time (RT)-based Concealed 28 Information Test (CIT). However, an important limitation of the CIT is the reliance on the 29 recognition of the probe item, and therefore the limited applicability when an innocent person 30 is aware of this item. In the present paper, we introduce an RT-based CIT that is based on 31 item-category associations: the Association-based Concealed Information Test (A-CIT). 32Using the participants' given names as probe items and self-referring "inducer" items (e.g., 33"MINE" or "ME") that establish an association between ownership and responses choices, in 34 Experiment 1 (within-subject design; n = 27), this method differentiated with high accuracy 35 between guilty and innocent conditions. Experiment 2 (n = 25) replicated Experiment 1, 36 except that the participants were informed of the probe item in the innocent condition -37 nonetheless, the accuracy rate remained high. Implications and future possibilities are 38 discussed. 39 40