An expert (dis)advantage in perceptual skill? Susceptibility to deception when viewing normal and blurred motion

A well-established characteristic of expertise in many sport skills is the ability to process biological motion to anticipate the actions of an opponent. Presently, it is unclear whether anticipation skill is based on the processing of local, featural information or more global, configural information. In the present study, we attempted to address this question by manipulating the level of visual blur. Expert, skilled, and novice tennis players (N = 56) attempted to judge serve direction in 96 video clips depicting two intermediate-club-level players serving to the deuce court. Each clip was temporally occluded at one of four levels relative to ball-racquet impact (-320 ms, -160 ms, 0 ms, +160 ms) and was shown with one of three levels of blur (no blur, 20% blur, 40% blur). The results revealed a significant effect of blur, such that judgment accuracy decreased as the level of blur increased. There was no interaction with skill level, suggesting that successful judgments were based upon the processing of featural rather than configural information in all three groups. Intriguingly, the novice players performed better than the skilled players who in turn performed better than the experts and this was consistent across all three levels of blur. Analysis of the proportion of correct responses for each trial (item solution probabilities) revealed evidence of greater susceptibility to deception in expert players. Specifically, the expert group had a total of 26 trials (out of 96) on which fewer than 20% of the group members were correct, compared with 15 trials for the skilled group and only 7 trials for the novice group. Finally, the number of deceptive trials was greatest in the 40% blur condition, suggesting that the serve motions depicted in the test trials violated the configural rules to which expert players have become sensitive