@article{64859,
  abstract     = {{This study investigated whether external effort mobilization through try-harder instructions enhances performance in complex motor tasks, as reflected by the reduction of costs associated with producing a deceptive action. Basketball passing movements with and without head fakes were examined in a reaction-time paradigm. Participants were generally instructed to initiate the movement as fast and accurately as possible, while try-harder instructions were presented in 25 % of trials, prompting participants to mobilize all their cognitive resources to perform even faster. To investigate if athletic expertise modulates the potential effects of effort mobilization, basketball novices and experienced players were tested. Results demonstrated that try-harder instructions generally improved participants’ performance, facilitating faster response initiation times and movement execution, as well as a specific reduction in initiation time variability. Novices benefited more than experienced players, indicating that effort results in greater improvement when complex motor actions (for example, passes with head fakes) are not yet fully stabilized and lack automated fluency. This pattern suggests that effort enhances performance in complex actions when performance is limited by the amount of cognitive capacity available, supporting the coordination of partly conflicting movement components within tight temporal constraints. The findings extend previous research on effort mobilization from simple to complex motor tasks. Try-harder instructions appear to enhance performance primarily by reducing attentional lapses rather than generally improving processing speed. Future research should investigate the effectiveness of effort mobilization in experienced athletes in situations of high concurrent cognitive load.}},
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Steinborn, Michael B. and Weigelt, Matthias and Güldenpenning, Iris}},
  issn         = {{1469-0292}},
  journal      = {{Psychology of Sport and Exercise}},
  keywords     = {{Effort, Try-harder instruction, Deception, Basketball, Head fake, Fake production}},
  publisher    = {{Elsevier BV}},
  title        = {{{Mobilizing effort in complex motor tasks: Try-harder instructions in deceptive actions}}},
  doi          = {{10.1016/j.psychsport.2026.103083}},
  volume       = {{84}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}

@inproceedings{66739,
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Schulze Frielinghaus, Lars and Böer, Nils Tobias and Schmidt, Thomas and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{18th FEPSAC European Congress of Sport Psychology: Performance, Health and Enhancement in Action}},
  location     = {{Timisoara}},
  title        = {{{Early postural dynamics reveal the rapid processing of fake social cues for deceptive actions in sports}}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}

@inproceedings{66742,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Steinborn, Michael B. and Weigelt, Matthias and Güldenpenning, Iris}},
  booktitle    = {{18th FEPSAC European Congress of Sport Psychology: Performance, Health and Enhancement in Action}},
  location     = {{Timisoara (Rumänien)}},
  title        = {{{Mobilizing Effort in Complex Motor Tasks: Try-Harder Instructions in Deceptive Actions}}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}

@article{66689,
  abstract     = {{<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
                  <jats:p>Deceptive actions such as head fakes are a hallmark of interactive sports, yet it is not well understood how decisions and whole-body responses to head fakes unfold over time. In the present study, participants viewed video sequences of a basketball player passing to the left or right, either with or without a head fake. In the buzzer task, participants moved laterally to press a response button as if to intercept the pass. In the vocal task, they verbally indicated pass direction. Reaction times (RTs), movement times (MTs), and medio-lateral center-of-pressure (CoP) displacements were recorded to investigate whether motor output is rapid and stimulus-driven or rather requires continuous integration of fake and pass cues. Further, we investigated whether the mere observation of a basketball player leads to overt micromovements even if no response movement is intended. The data analysis shows that head fakes increased RTs in both the buzzer and vocal tasks. In the buzzer task, head fakes induced an initial, small erroneous CoP shift, which was then rapidly corrected. When CoP trajectories were aligned by head orientation, fake and non-fake trajectories diverged shortly after movement onset. In the present dynamic sport-related context, this pattern is more compatible with the early integration of head and pass information than with a strictly sequential prime-target account, although the paradigm differs from classic Rapid Chase Theory designs with discrete primes and target events. In the vocal task, participants were not instructed to move, yet CoP traces showed tiny but systematically lateralized micromovements with a temporal structure resembling that in the buzzer task, albeit without an initial erroneous shift for head fakes. These postural fluctuations are consistent with action-observation-related motor activation, although they do not uniquely identify motor resonance and may also reflect attentional or generalized embodied response tendencies. A clear deceptive response conflict at the postural level emerged only when a lateralized action was prepared.</jats:p>}},
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Schulze Frielinghaus, Lars and Böer, Nils Tobias and Schmidt, Thomas and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  issn         = {{2045-2322}},
  journal      = {{Scientific Reports}},
  number       = {{1}},
  publisher    = {{Springer Science and Business Media LLC}},
  title        = {{{Early postural dynamics reveal the rapid processing of fake social cues for deceptive actions in sports}}},
  doi          = {{10.1038/s41598-026-61922-8}},
  volume       = {{16}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}

@inproceedings{65257,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Steinborn, Michael B. and Weigelt, Matthias and Güldenpenning, Iris}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstracts of the 68th Conference of Experimental Psychologists}},
  editor       = {{Kaup, Barbara and Roth, Lilly and Rück, Franziska}},
  keywords     = {{effort, try-harder instruction, deception, sport psychology, action and perception}},
  location     = {{Tübingen}},
  title        = {{{When Trying Harder Helps: Effort Instructions Affect Performance in Complex Motor Tasks}}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}

@inproceedings{66733,
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Schulze Frielinghaus, Lars and Böer, Nils Tobias and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstracts of the 68th Conference of Experimental Psychologists}},
  editor       = {{Barbara, Kaup and Lilly, Roth and Franziska, Rück}},
  location     = {{Tübingen}},
  title        = {{{From interference to priming? Reinterpreting the head-fake effect in basketball through continuous measurements}}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}

@inproceedings{66736,
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Schulze Frielinghaus, Lars and Böer, Nils Tobias and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstracts of the 58th Annual Conference of the German Association of Sport Psychology}},
  location     = {{Heidelberg}},
  title        = {{{Rapid chase or continuous flow of information? Visual-motor processing of head fakes in basketball}}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}

@inproceedings{61884,
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Schulze Freilinghaus, Lars and Böer, Nils Tobias and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{57. Herbsttagung experimentelle Kognitionspsychologie (HexKop)}},
  editor       = {{Geißler, Christoph F. and Schöpper, Lars-Michael}},
  location     = {{Trier}},
  title        = {{{Unraveling the head-fake effect: Dynamic measures of cognitive conflict in sport contexts}}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

@article{62111,
  abstract     = {{<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
          <jats:p>The execution of incompatible actions imposes costs on action planning, commonly known as response-response incompatibility-costs. This phenomenon is also evident in sports: A basketball player who performs a pass in one direction whilst orienting the head into the contrary direction (pass with head fake) needs more time to initiate the action as if pass direction and head orientation are the same (pass without head fake).</jats:p>
          <jats:p>The aim of this study was twofold: First, we present a re-analysis of the data from Böer et al. (Psychological Research 88:523–524, 2024) using mixture effect modelling (Miller, Behavior Research Methods 38:92–106, 2006) explore if fake-production costs manifest continuously (uniform effect) in all participants or if some participants show fake-production costs occasionally but substantially (mixed effect). Second, we collected data of a control group which was analysed with the previous data of the practice group and fitted initiation times (ITs) to an ex-Gaussian distribution.</jats:p>
          <jats:p>The analysis of mixture effects revealed that most participants exhibited a uniform effect when they didn’t have time to mentally prepare the movement. This pattern was not changed by practice, suggesting fake-production costs can’t be overcome by practice alone without mental preparation time.</jats:p>
          <jats:p>The analysis of mean ITs revealed improvements in the practice group but not in the control group, independent of the type of pass performed. The distribution analyses complemented these findings as it showed that the improvement in participants’ performance with increasing practice can mainly be attributed to a reduction of the exponential part of the distribution (parameter tau).</jats:p>}},
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Schütz, Christoph and Weigelt, Matthias and Güldenpenning, Iris}},
  issn         = {{0340-0727}},
  journal      = {{Psychological Research}},
  keywords     = {{Sport Psychology, Sport Science, Deception, Distribution Analysis}},
  number       = {{2}},
  publisher    = {{Springer Science and Business Media LLC}},
  title        = {{{How does practice modulate fake-production costs in a basketball task? Analyses of frequency distributions and mixture effects}}},
  doi          = {{10.1007/s00426-025-02084-6}},
  volume       = {{89}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

@inproceedings{62116,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Güldenpenning, Iris and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{57th Herbsttreffen der experimentellen Kognitionspsychologie (HExKoP)}},
  keywords     = {{Deception, Sport Psychology, Social Interaction}},
  location     = {{Trier}},
  title        = {{{The mere presence of a social partner modulates fake-production costs}}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

@inproceedings{65259,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Güldenpenning, Iris and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{67th Conference of Experimental Psychologists}},
  editor       = {{Lê-Hoa Võ, Melissa and Fiebach, Christian and Shing, Yee Lee and Sammler, Daniela and Windmann, Sabine and Kaiser, Jochen}},
  keywords     = {{deception, action preparation, perception, movement planning, sport psychology}},
  location     = {{Frankfurt am Main}},
  pages        = {{132}},
  title        = {{{Differences of producing head fakes with and without a social partner}}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

@inproceedings{60133,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Güldenpenning, Iris and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstracts of the 57th Annual Conference of the German Association of Sport Psychology}},
  editor       = {{Kullik, Lisa and Birnkraut, Tim and Kellmann, Michael}},
  location     = {{Bochum}},
  pages        = {{105}},
  title        = {{{Differences of producing head fakes with and without a social partner}}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

@article{54690,
  abstract     = {{In basketball, an attacking player often plays a pass to one side while looking to the other side. This head fake provokes a conflict in the observing opponent, as the processing of the head orientation interferes with the processing of the pass direction. Accordingly, responses to passes with head fakes are slower and result in more errors than responses to passes without head fakes (head-fake effect). The head-fake effect and structurally similar interference effects (e.g., Stroop effect) are modulated by the frequency of conflicting trials. Previous studies mostly applied a block-wise manipulation of proportion congruency. However, in basketball (and also in other team sports), where different individual opponents can be encountered, it might be important to take the individual frequency (e.g., 20% vs. 80%) of these opponents into account. Therefore, the present study investigates the possibility to quickly (i.e., on a trial-by-trial basis) reconfigure the response behavior to different proportions of incongruent trials, which are contingent on different basketball players. Results point out that participants indeed adapted to the fake-frequency of different basketball players, which could be the result of strategic adaptation processes. Multi-level analyses, however, indicate that a substantial portion of the player-specific adaptation to fake frequencies is accounted by episodic retrieval processes, suggesting that item-specific proportion congruency effects can be explained in terms of stimulus-response binding and retrieval: The head orientation (e.g., to the right) of a current stimulus retrieves the last episode with the same head orientation including the response that was part of this last episode. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, an attacking player would provoke the strongest detrimental effect on an opponent if s/he repeats the same head movement but changes the direction of the pass. Whether it is at all possible to strategically apply this recommendation in practice needs still to be answered.}},
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Böer, Nils Tobias and Kunde, Wilfried and Giesen, Carina G. and Rothermund, Klaus and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  journal      = {{Psychological Research}},
  pages        = {{1702--1711}},
  title        = {{{Context-specific adaptation for head fakes in basketball: a study on player-specific fake-frequency schedules}}},
  doi          = {{10.1007/s00426-024-01977-2}},
  volume       = {{88}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@inproceedings{57501,
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Böer, Nils Tobias and Kunde, Wilfried and Giesen, Carina G. and Rothermund, Klaus and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstracts of the 66th Conference of Experimental Psychologists}},
  editor       = {{Fröber, Kerstin and Abel, Magdalena and Bäuml, Karl-Heinz and Dreisbach, Gesine and Kliegl, Oliver and Köster, Moritz and Lingnau, Angelika and Volberg, Gregor and Götz, Felix J.}},
  location     = {{Regensburg}},
  publisher    = {{LibreCat University}},
  title        = {{{Context-specific adaptation for head fakes in basketball: a study on player-specific fake-frequency schedules}}},
  doi          = {{10.23668/PSYCHARCHIVES.15242}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@inproceedings{57511,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Weigelt, Matthias and Güldenpenning, Iris}},
  editor       = {{Fröber, Kerstin and Abel, Magdalena and Bäuml, Karl-Heinz and Dreisbach, Gesine and Kliegl, Oliver and Köster, Moritz and Lingnau, Angelika and Volberg, Gregor and Götz, Felix J.}},
  keywords     = {{action preparation, perception, movement planning, deception}},
  location     = {{ Regensburg }},
  pages        = {{77}},
  title        = {{{Try harder! - The influence of effort instructions on fake production costs in basketball novices and experts}}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@inproceedings{58841,
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Böer, Nils Tobias and Kunde, Wilfried and Giesen, Carina G. and Rothermund, Klaus and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstractband des 56. Herbsttreffens experimentelle Kognitionspsychologie (HexKop)}},
  location     = {{Paderborn}},
  title        = {{{Context-specific adaptation for head fakes in basketball: a study on player-specific fake-frequency schedules}}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@inproceedings{54303,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Güldenpenning, Iris and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{56. Jahrestagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Sportpsychologie (ASP)}},
  editor       = {{Koester, Dirk and Krämer, Lina and Fuhlert, Leonhard and Everding, Jannik and Weilharter, Fritz and Marlovits, Andreas}},
  location     = {{Berlin}},
  pages        = {{119}},
  title        = {{{The influence of effort instruction on fake production costs in basketball novices and experienced basketball players.}}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@article{48484,
  abstract     = {{<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Previous research indicates that performing passes with a head fake in basketball leads to increased response initiation times and errors as compared to performing a pass without a head fake. These so-called fake production costs only occurred when not given the time to mentally prepare the deceptive movement. In the current study, we investigated if extensive practice could reduce the cognitive costs of producing a pass with head fake. Twenty-four basketball novices participated in an experiment on five consecutive days. A visual cue prompted participants to play a pass with or without a head fake either to the left or right side. The cued action had to be executed after an interstimulus interval (ISI) of either 0 ms, 400 ms, 800 ms or 1200 ms, allowing for different movement preparation times. Results indicated higher response initiation times (ITs) and error rates (ERs) for passes with head fakes for the short preparation intervals (ISI 0 ms and 400 ms) on the first day but no difference for the longer preparation intervals (ISI 800 ms and 1200 ms). After only one day of practice, participants showed reduced fake production costs (for ISI 0 ms) and were even able to eliminate these cognitive costs when given time to mentally prepare the movement (for ISI 400 ms). Accordingly, physical practice can reduce the cognitive costs associated with head-fake generation. This finding is discussed against the background of the strengthening of stimulus response associations.</jats:p>}},
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Weigelt, Matthias and Schütz, Christoph and Güldenpenning, Iris}},
  issn         = {{0340-0727}},
  journal      = {{Psychological Research}},
  keywords     = {{Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Medicine}},
  pages        = {{523--534}},
  publisher    = {{Springer Science and Business Media LLC}},
  title        = {{{Practice reduces the costs of producing head fakes in basketball}}},
  doi          = {{10.1007/s00426-023-01885-x}},
  volume       = {{88}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@inproceedings{47630,
  author       = {{Böer, Nils Tobias and Güldenpenning, Iris and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstracts of the 55th Autumn Meeting of Experimental Cognitive Psychology (HExKoP)}},
  editor       = {{Bogenschütz, Luisa and Fenske, Pia and Ayatollahi, Shabnamalsadat and Hamzeloo, Mohammad and Montoya, Gustavo Adolfo León and Viegas, Lisa and Baess, Pamela and Hackländer, Ryan}},
  keywords     = {{action preparation, perception, movement planning, deception}},
  location     = {{Hildesheim}},
  pages        = {{16--17}},
  title        = {{{The influence of effort instructions on fake production costs in basketball novices and experts}}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}

@inproceedings{45825,
  author       = {{Güldenpenning, Iris and Böer, Nils Tobias and Kunde, Wilfried and Weigelt, Matthias}},
  booktitle    = {{Abstracts of the 65th Conference of experimental Psychologists (TeaP)}},
  editor       = {{Merz, Simon and Frings, Christian and Leuchtenberg, Bettina and Moeller, Birte and Mueller, Stefanie and Neumann, Roland and Pastötter, Bernhard and Pingen, Leah and Schui, Gabriel}},
  location     = {{Trier}},
  pages        = {{139--140}},
  title        = {{{Adaptation to context information for head fakes in basketball}}},
  doi          = {{https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.12945}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}