Professional athletes tend to tell similar stories about how the world looks to them when they’re “in the zone”: time seems to slow down just a bit, and whatever ball they’re trying to crush with a foot, bat or racquet appears to swell in size. But does the world really look different to highly skilled actors?

Purdue University’s Jessica Witt has been investigating stories like these for the better part of the last decade. A world-champion Ultimate Frisbee player herself, Witt has found that baseball players on hot streaks really do perceive the ball as larger, and golfers see the target hole as wider when their putts are consistently dropping in.

At this week’s Vision Sciences Society’s annual meeting in Naples, Florida, two of Witt’s graduate students presented the latest set of experiment’s from her lab, extending their investigation to two new properties in two new sports: Ball speed in tennis, and wall height in Parkour, an urban recreational sport whose practitioners, called traceurs, climb impossibly high walls and flip onto roofs of buildings.

Mila Sugovic launched tennis balls at skilled players and novices, controlling speed with a ball machine. The players then estimated the speed of each shot by matching the perceived duration of flight with a computer animation of a ball flying through the air. The experts were, of course, much better at the task, but Sugovic found distorted perception of the balls in both groups. A player who swung too late was more likely to perceive the ball as moving faster, and a player who swung too early was more likely to see the ball as moving slower.

Earlier in the conference, Eric Taylor presented his work on wall height in Parkour. He brought novices and skilled traceurs to walls of different heights, and asked them how easily they believed they could climb the walls. Then he would place a cone on the ground next to them and ask the participants to adjust the cone until they felt that the lateral distance from their feet to the cone was equal to the height of the wall.

For low walls, the novices and experts both felt they could climb the wall, and neither group estimated the height of the wall differently than the other. But as wall height increased, the traceurs were able to climb walls the novices were not, and on those conditions the skilled climbers gave lower estimates for the height of the wall than the novices did. Skilled traceurs see the walls as lower than the rest of us.

I posed a question to Witt’s graduate students that they said they hear all the time: If skilled athletes like golfers really do see a wider hole, but the real hole isn’t actually any wider, then the golfers are making a perceptual error — why don’t they miss the hole more often?

The answer they gave is that perception of the environment is scaled to our abilities — not the other way around, as one might think. We perceive the world in whichever way will best facilitate actions, even if that means seeing a wall as shorter than it really is. The point isn’t that the traceurs see the walls as lower, but that they see them as easier to climb, which, in their case, is how the wall really is.

Posted on behalf of Chaz Firestone