Professional basketball players are far better judges of whether a shot will result in a basket than coaches, sports journalists or novices, shows a new study appearing online August 10 in Nature Neuroscience.

When viewing videos of a basketball shot, novices, coaches and sports journalists watch the ball to predict how a shot will fall. But players reenact the shot in their own brains and muscles and can tell if it’s a basket even before the ball leaves the hand.

These results put another win on the board for one side in a scientific debate about how people understand action and infer what others are thinking. One side of the debate holds that, with experience, people amass a checklist of criteria to tell what other people think and what they are likely to do next. The other school of thought is that people simulate the actions of others in their own minds to predict what happens next.

While scientists will probably continue to debate, the new study is further evidence that learning by doing beats couch-potato learning, says Scott Grafton, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“The more you do something, the more it is embodied in you,” Grafton says. “It doesn’t just change your muscle memory, it changes the way you see the world around you.”

Italian researchers led by Salvatore Aglioti of the Sapienza University of Rome tested professional basketball players, coaches, sports journalists and novice watchers in Verona, Italy, to see how the groups predicted the outcome of shots. The researchers showed short video clips of someone shooting a basketball and asked the volunteers to predict whether a shot was “in” or “out.” The clips all stopped before the ball reached the basket. The researchers also measured the activity of nerves and muscles in the volunteers’ hands.

If people simply compile a checklist of criteria to predict consequences of an action, then coaches and sports journalists (considered “expert watchers”) should be just as good as players at predicting whether a shot goes in. And both players and the expert watchers should be much better than novices.

Players proved to be far more accurate at forecasting shots than either group of watchers, even when video clips stopped before the ball left the hand, the researchers found. At the instant before the ball left the hand, the players were able to correctly predict the shot about 70 percent of the time, while the expert watchers and novices correctly called the outcome less than 40 percent of the time, about the same as chance.

Players picked up on subtle differences in the angle of the legs, wrist and hand and replayed the shot in their own muscles and brains, anticipating the outcome long before the ball reached the rim. If the shot was destined to be out, the players’ hand muscles showed more activity than for good shots.

That makes sense, Aglioti says. “If it goes in, it’s over, but if it’s out, you have to be ready.”

Novices’ muscles didn’t react while watching the video clips. They watched the trajectory of the ball and couldn’t accurately predict the outcome until the ball was nearly at the basket. The coaches, mostly former players, did activate their brains and nervous systems but tended to react to everything.

“They’re on their toes, but in a non-specific way,” Aglioti says.

Ordinary people probably run simulations every day while watching others walk, reach or interact with others, says James Kilner, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging and University College London. And anyone who has ever run will likely feel some tension in their own muscles as Olympic athletes settle into the blocks.

“You’re not in same state as the athletes,” Kilner says, “but there’s a massive hush that falls over the stadium at that moment.”

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