Decoding of Postperformance Nonverbal Behavior of Tennis Players: Is a Shorter Response Time Associated With Higher Accuracy?

The decoding of nonverbal behavior is thought to be influenced by both bottom-up automatic perceptual and top-down higher order cognitive processes. In this study, we aimed to provide initial evidence for the association between response time and accuracy, as a first step toward understanding how such processes may operate. To that end, 145 individuals (66 female; Mage = 32.18) were presented 80 videos of amateur tennis players' nonverbal behavior directly after the rally. After each video, the participants were asked to estimate whether the previous point was won or lost. The results showed that the response time was about a half second faster for correct (M = 3,052.78 ms, SD = 840) than for incorrect (M = 3,567.77 ms, SD = 1,048.15) responses. These findings provide first evidence that faster responses are related to greater accuracy, suggesting that efficient, possibly more intuitive processes may facilitate decoding in this context.