Disguise and Deception of Action Outcomes Through Sports Garment Design Impair Anticipation Judgments

The ability to disguise and deceive action outcomes was examined by manipulating sports garments. In Experiment 1, those with higher and lower skill levels in anticipation predicted the throw direction of an opponent who wore a garment designed to disguise kinetic-chain information. Higher skill anticipators were more adversely affected by the disguise garment than the lower skill anticipators, demonstrating that disguise removed the anticipation advantage. In Experiment 2, using the same occlusion methodology, the effect of deception was examined using 2 garments designed to create visual illusions of motion across the proximal-to-distal sequence of the thrower's action and compared with a white-garment control. Performances for the deceptive garments were reduced relative to the control garment at the earliest occlusion points for the rightmost targets, but this effect was reversed for the leftmost targets at the earliest occlusion point, suggesting that the visual illusion garments were deceiving participants about motion information from the proximal-to-distal sequence of the action.