Time flies when we view a sport action

Abstract

Humans' time evaluation within the range of hundreds of milliseconds is often distorted, and time is judged as much longer than actually is. This consistent overestimation has been interpreted as an indicator of the threshold level for the sensitivity of the perceptuomotor system. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the perception of time, both in sub- and supra-second timescales, changes for elite athletes that are considered as individuals with highly developed motor perceptual capabilities and with great sense of time particularly for the extremely short timescales. For this purpose, we asked elite pole-vaulters to reproduce the exposure times of a familiar image showing a pole-vault jump and non-familiar images as a fencing lunge and scrambled pixels and compared their estimates with controls. While the time distortion in the supra-second range was similar for athletes and controls independently from the image presented, in the sub-second range of time, athletes were more accurate and less variable than controls, while for all the participants, the images were perceived differently. Time was perceived as shorter when viewing the pole-vault jump image followed by the fencing lunge and last the scrambled pixels, providing the evidence that action observation distorts individuals' time perception by compressing the perceived passage of time. Remarkably though pole-vaulters' higher precision and lower variability than controls indicate their ability to compensate for this distortion due to a well-refined internal clock developed through sport training.

Peer Review #2 of "Sports experts’ unique perception of time duration based on the processing principle of an integrated model of timing (v0.1)"

“…Regarding the bias results, most participants in the task showed a tendency to overestimate subsecond durations and underestimate suprasecond durations, which is consistent with the results of other studies (Chen et al 2014). This finding is a well-known phenomenon in the field of time perception, especially in the reproduction task, and scholars have already offered a reasonable explanation (Wearden & Lejeune 2007).…”

“…However, previous research found that sports experts have a more precise and stable timing ability than nonathletes, and the results of a reduced AE ratio and CV for sports experts were not repeated in this research. For example, Chen et al (2014) found that compared with nonathletes, athletes had reduced AE ratios in subsecond time ranges and reduced CVs in both subsecond and suprasecond time ranges for both expertiserelated and non-expertise-related stimuli. Our results suggest that there were no differences among the different groups with regard to the CV.…”

“…Second, the sample sizes in previous studies were quite small. For instance, the elite athlete group in Chen et al (2014) had only 12 participants, and as a result, there might have been a greater proportion of false positive findings due to the problem of low statistical power (Fraley & Vazire 2014;Schweizer & Furley 2016). However, the lack of additional evidence from other studies examining sports experts' duration perception makes it difficult to draw solid conclusions.…”

“…However, this prediction has not yet been tested. Moreover, although some studies have suggested that sports experts have more precise and stable duration perception than nonathletes (Chen & Cesari 2015;Chen et al 2013;Chen et al 2014), whether sports experts perceive a longer duration than others for expertise-related stimuli remains unclear.…”

Do experts see it in slow motion? Altered timing of action simulation uncovers domain-specific perceptual processing in expert athletes

“…This appears to be 35 particularly important for sportive competition, given the key role of action anticipation, motor coordination and motor 36 synchronization for a successful sportive performance. The study by Chen et al (2014) provides support to this view, 37 documenting higher accuracy and lower variability in elite fencers asked to reproduce the duration of an image of 38 scrambled pixels. This study suggests that elite athletes may be equipped with a superior ability in detecting the 39 duration of visual stimuli, which might be related to their long-term sport training.…”