Flubbing a field goal kick doesn't just bruise your ego — new research shows it may actually change how your brain sees the goal posts.

In a study of 23 non-football athletes who each kicked 10 field goals, researchers found that players' performance directly affected their perception of the size of the goal: After a series of missed kicks, athletes perceived the post to be taller and more narrow than before, while successful kicks made the post appear larger-than-life.

Professional athletes have long claimed that their perception changes when they're playing well — they start hitting baseballs as large as grapefruits, or aiming at golf holes the size of a bucket — but many scientists have been slow to accept that performance can alter visual perception.

"The reason why this is so radical is that perception has always been conceived as being all about information received by the eye," said pychology researcher Jessica Witt of Purdue University, who co-authored the paper published last month in Perception. "In my studies we keep all the optical information constant, so the eye is seeing the exact same info — but it looks different depending on performance."

According to visual perception researcher Maggie Shiffrar of Rutgers University, who was not involved in the research, Witt's conclusions are troubling to many scientists because they suggest that computer studies of perception might not be a reflection of reality.

"If Witt is right that what we see depends upon what we can do, then it logically follows that many of us have spent our lives studying perception in the WRONG WAY," Shiffrar wrote in an e-mail. "In the vast majority of studies conducted in my lab, for example, observers view displays on a flat computer screen and make simple, dichotomous judgments about their perceptions of those displays. Thus, subjects in my studies don't do anything other than push a button. The results of Witt's studies suggest that the results that I've collected and the corresponding theoretical conclusions that I've drawn won't generalize to perception in the real world. In the real world, people look at objects so that they can do something with those objects."

Although many scientists are surprised, Witt says subjective perception is a concept most of us are already familiar with. For example, she said, when running around a track, you may know logically that long, straight stretch is always a constant 100 meters — but by the end of a run, those same 100 meters appear to stretch on forever.

Witt and her colleague, graduate student and former football player Travis Dorsch, chose to experiment with field goal kicks because they wanted to study the disconnect between what people think they can do and what they can actually accomplish. "When you watch college and pro football, field goal kicks seem so easy," Witt said. "But when I went out with Travis to try it myself, it was actually really hard to do."

The researchers used a small, adjustable replica of a goal post to test players' perception before and after attempting 10 kicks. While standing in front of the real-life goal, participants were asked to adjust the width and height of the model to scale.

The players' pre-performance estimations didn't correlate at all with their subsequent success rate. But after 10 field goal attempts, their perceived goal size was highly correlated with peformance.

Interestingly, the change in players' perception didn't just depend on how many goals they missed — it also mattered *how *they missed their goals. Folks who failed because they didn't kick high enough perceived the crossbar to be taller, while those who kicked to the side viewed it as more narrow.

Previous studies by Witt and her colleagues have shown that performance can also influence perception among golfers and softball players. But the researchers say this is the first time that particular performance errors have been correlated with specific effects on perception.

"One of the things that has been asked of us in our research is, if you’re playing well, do you just see everything as bigger, does the whole world look like it's expanded?" Witt said. "But this research shows that changes in perception are specific to what you're acting on."

Next, Witt hopes to look at whether professional athletes can improve their performance by changing their pre-game perceptions. For instance, are golfers who see a larger hole more likely to make the shot? "Currently, we’re testing this using visual illusions in golf that make the hole look bigger or smaller," Witt said.

Image 1: Flickr/sethhenry1. Image 2: Jessica Witt/Purdue University. From "Kicking to bigger uprights: Field goal kicking performance influences perceived size," Perception, 2009, Vol 38: 1328-1340.

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