Résumé
Recent research has shown that athletes judge their possibilities for action (i.e., affordances) differently during positive and negative psychological momentum (PM, Den Hartigh, Van der Sluis, & Zaal, 2018). Participants in a golf experiment judged the maximum ‘puttable distance’ from the hole as longer when they moved toward the victory (positive PM) than when they moved away from it (negative PM). However, does PM have comparable effects on actual affordances? In the current study, 52 ball sport athletes participated in a lateral interception task (PONG). First, participants entered a baseline measure that determined which balls were verbally judged as interceptable (Group 1), or were actually interceptable (Group 2). Next, participants played a match where they had to intercept as many balls as possible. Here, feedback on successes and failures was manipulated to induce a positive or negative PM. Finally, participants received the same balls as in their baseline measure again. Interestingly, our results showed that PM had a different and unexpected effect on judged and actualized affordances. First, when looking at the actualized affordances , there was a counterintuitive opposite tendency: Compared to the baseline measure, participants intercepted relatively more balls after the negative PM manipulation than after the positive PM manipulation (p = .009). Furthermore, although participants intercepted less balls after the positive PM manipulation compared to the baseline, they judged relatively more balls to be interceptable (p =.011). This study opens the door to further explore the link between PM and affordances