DAVIE, Calif., Nov. 5 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they have discovered tennis referees are more likely to make an error calling a ball "out" than "in" because of perceptual misperceptions.
The University of California-Davis researchers led by Associate Professor David Whitney studied a bias in which the perceived location of a moving object is consistently shifted in the direction of the object's motion.
The scientists said that bias makes the object appear to be located farther along its path than it really is. And, they added, because the perceived location of the object is erroneously shifted in the direction of its movement, tennis referees should erroneously judge balls to be "out" much more often than "in."
Whitney and his research team tested the hypothesis by reviewing more than 4,000 randomly selected Wimbledon tennis points. They discovered 83 incorrect calls, of which 70 were erroneous judgments that the ball was "out."
The scientists said their finding suggests the use of video recordings to review the judgments of tennis referees.
"If that proves prohibitively time-consuming, the rules allowing players to challenge referee judgments should be scrutinized at least, in light of the current findings," they wrote.
The research appears in the journal Current Biology.
