Better at Bat

Reported August 2006

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Why do some players hit it out of the park, when others can barely get it past the pitcher? Could it be that athletes playing well in a baseball game see the ball as a different size than it really is?

When heavy-hitter Paul Rugani steps up to plate, he's ready to knock a softball out of the park. "It's fun to hit. It's fun to get on base," Rugani says. "I like being up in situations where I can knock runners in."

Good players like Rugani can bring in home runs easily, and many athletes claim when they hit well in a game, the ball appears much bigger than it really is. Now, cognitive psychology student Jessica Witt sets out to find out if the theory is true.

"I watched players play, and after the games were over, I asked them to look at an array of different sized circles and pick which circle they thought best matched the size of the softball," Witt, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, tells Ivanhoe.

Witt found players picking the larger circles performed better, proving that a player's perception of the ball's size is somehow linked to his performance. "It's hard to know which direction the effect goes," she says. "Do you see it as bigger and therefore hit better, or are you hitting better and therefore see it as bigger?"

She also found athletes who hit poorly see the ball as being much smaller than it really is. She says, "If we're a poor hitter, we see the world full of really, tiny, tiny, tiny balls that are really difficult to hit."

So to do well in a game, think big to hit big.

Witt recently conducted another study to find out if golfers who do well in a game see the cup as being bigger. Preliminary results suggest golfers do, indeed, see the cup bigger when playing well.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jessica Witt
Cognitive Psychology
University of Virginia
(434) 982-4744
jwitt@virginia.edu

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