On the basketball court: How territorial context impacts information processing and responses

Self-relevance impacts the way humans process and respond to objects and within space. Specifically, self-relevant objects are responded to faster than those that are not (self prioritisation). Interestingly, self-prioritisation does not emerge outside of self-relevant space (Strachan et al., 2020). In the present work, we investigate how the practical relevance of territory, moderated by task-specific expertise, impacts self-prioritisation. A sample of 24 non-experts and 24 expert basketballers were asked to make judgements to determine the best action (attack or help) for a player (own or opponent team) relative to where that player
appeared on the court (own side or opponent side). The action ‘attack’ sent the player to the opposite side of the court (to score). The action ‘Help’ sent the player to the same side of the court (to help and play defence). Interestingly, experts were faster to respond to their own team when it was in other-territory, which is contrary to previous findings suggesting that self-prioritisation should occur in self-territory. We suggest that the additional context of a
basketball court for expert players may lead to variations in how privileged processing manifests. Specifically, in this case, the goal (which is in other territory), appears to drive the privileged processing.