How does practice modulate fake production costs in basketball? Analyses of frequency distributions and mixture effects

Abstract The execution of incompatible actions imposes costs on action planning, commonly known as response-response incompatibility costs. This phenomenon is evident in various domains, including the sports context, such as executing head fakes in basketball, where spatially incompatible actions, like a head turn to the right paired with a passing movement to the left, are performed. Building upon prior research demonstrating that extensive practice diminishes the costs associated with producing passes with head fakes (Böer et al., 2023), this paper delves deeper into the underlying mechanisms driving the observed reduction in fake production costs. We employed distribution analyses by fitting individual frequency distributions of initiation times (ITs) to ex-Gaussian distributions. This approach allowed us to discern whether practice predominantly influences the Gaussian part or the exponential part of the distribution. Additionally, we applied mixture effect modeling (Miller, 2006) to explore whether fake production costs manifest occasionally but substantially (mixed effect) or continuously but moderately (uniform effect).The distribution analyses showed that the improvement in participants’ performance and the reduction of fake production costs with increasing practice can mainly be attributed to a reduction of the exponential part of the distribution, indicating an improvement of participants decision-making processes (Whelan, 2008). The analysis of mixture effects revealed that most participants exhibited a uniform effect when they didn’t have time to mentally prepare the movement, indicated by consistent fake production costs which were present in over 75% of trials. This pattern was not changed by practice, suggesting fake production costs can’t be overcome by practice.