Abstract
Decision-making skills are essential to successful performance. To train them, coaches frequently use video replays to show their athletes how to best respond when facing specific situations. Recently, it has been shown that presenting the videos in virtual reality (VR) led to enhanced transfer, from the laboratory to the playing field, compared to when the videos were presented on a standard computer screen (CS). Interestingly, although the videos were identical, many participants informally reported that the VR videos felt accelerated. Here, we tested this claim by having varsity-level basketball players perform a decision-making task concomitantly with a playback speed estimation task. All participants observed the same video clips in the VR and CS conditions, and the video clips were either presented at their normal speed or had been accelerated or decelerated by 10%. Our results revealed that participants perceived the VR videos as significantly faster than the CS videos (mean perceived playback speed of 100.7% ± 2.35% and 94.9% ± 2.24%, respectively). This difference was, however, caused by the CS videos appearing slower than they truly were. Our results suggest that virtual reality may enhance decision-making training because of the increased similarity between the videos and reality.Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Caleb Pagé and Pierre-Michel Bernier for allowing us to use their video clips.