When a sports performance is at its peak, it is akin to a musical performance in the sense that each player seems to perform their part effortlessly, creating a rhythmic flow of counterparts all moving as one. Rhythm and timing are vital elements in sports like basketball in which syncopated passing and shooting appear to facilitate accuracy. This study tests if shooting baskets “in rhythm,” as measured by the catch-to-release time, reliably enhances shooting accuracy. It then tests if an “in rhythm” timing is commonly detected and agreed upon by observers, and if observer timing ratings are related to shooting accuracy. Experiment 1 tests the shooting accuracy of two amateur basketball players after different delays between catching a pass and shooting the ball. Shots were taken from the three-point line (180 shots). All shots were recorded and analyzed for accuracy as a function of delay time, and the recordings were used to select stimuli varying in timing intervals for observers to view in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, 24 observers each reviewed 17 video clips of the shots to test visual judgment of shooting-in-rhythm. The delay times ranged from 0.3 to 3.2 seconds, with a goal of having some of the shots taken too fast, some close to in rhythm, and some too slow. Observers rated if each shot occurs too fast, in rhythm slightly fast, in rhythm slightly slow, or too slow. In Experiment 1, shooters exhibited a significant cubic fit with better shooting performance in the middle of the timing distribution (1.2 sec optimal delay) between catching a pass and shooting. In Experiment, 2 observers reliably judged shots to be in rhythm centered at 1.1 ± 0.2 seconds, which matched the delay that leads to optimal performance for the shooters found in Experiment 1. The pattern of findings confirms and validates that there is a common “in rhythm” catch-to-shoot delay time of a little over 1 second that both optimizes shooter accuracy and is reliably recognized by observers.

Recent studies indicate that words containing /ӕ/ and /u/ vowel phonemes can be mapped onto the emotional dimension of arousal. Specifically, the wham-womb effect describes the inclination to associate words with /ӕ/ vowel-sounds (as in “wham”) with high-arousal emotions and words with /u/ vowel-sounds (as in “womb”) with low-arousal emotions. The objective of this study was to replicate the wham-womb effect using nonsense pseudowords and to test if findings extend with use of a novel methodology that includes verbal auditory and visual pictorial stimuli, which can eventually be used to test young children. We collected data from 99 undergraduate participants through an online survey. Participants heard pre-recorded pairs of monosyllabic pseudowords containing /ӕ/ or /u/ vowel phonemes and then matched individual pseudowords to illustrations portraying high or low arousal emotions. Two t-tests were conducted to analyze the size of the wham-womb effect across pseudowords and across participants, specifically the likelihood that /ӕ/ sounds are paired with high arousal images and /u/ sounds with low arousal images. Our findings robustly confirmed the wham-womb effect. Participants paired /ӕ/ words with high arousal emotion pictures and /u/ words with low arousal ones at a 73.2% rate with a large effect size. The wham-womb effect supports the idea that verbal acoustic signals tend to be tied to embodied facial musculature that is related to human emotions, which supports the adaptive value of sound symbolism in language evolution and development.