Play too quick for referees

This is not about keeping up with the game - being physically athletic enough. It's about the brain's athleticism.

The Guardian recently published a Reuters story by Ben Klayman on the human being's mental ability to keep up with the game.

The article was prompted by the incident in the soccer World Cup when England's Frank Lampard's shot hit the underside of the crossbar, bounced over the goal-line and then back into the field of play and the keeper's grateful grasp. It seemed that everybody saw it was a goal except the referee and his assistant.

There was talk of the introduction of technology or goal-watchers. In Klayman's article there is talk of human capacity to referee.

Klayman says: "Scientists who study the human brain say it is surprising that bad calls do not happen more often."

Klayman goes on to quote David Meyer, director of the University of Michigan's Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory, as saying: "Despite all of the apparent surprise that the referees would be blowing [= getting wrong] calls, especially at crucial points, from a psychological standpoint this is what we would expect.

"It's like every once in a while you draw the ace of spades. It's going to happen."

Neurobiologists and psychologists are examining the matter. One of them, Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, said: "Human beings are never going to be perfect at making calls. Our memories just aren't cut out to allow us to be perfect referees.

"Our eyes work a lot like cameras but our memories don't work anything like an SD [secure digital) card used in digital cameras]. We can't literally play back what we just saw."

Emilio Salinas, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said that what made it tougher was the "fleeting nature of moves in sport". He coauthored a paper entitled Perceptual decision making in less than 30 milliseconds in which it stated that as little as 30 milliseconds of extra viewing time was the difference between a correct and an incorrect judgment about whether a flashed light had turned red or green. Salinas said: "Thirty milliseconds is sort of an upper bound on how fast you can do that kind of discrimination."

This is the case with things the referee can see. It is worse  when his view is blocked or too much is happening. Meyer said the maximum number of players any one person could carefully track was four, meaning something would be missed even with multiple referees watching.

When referees do miss a crucial piece of evidence, their brain will fill in the gaps using past experiences to help them make the call. Marcus said: "Filling in is really a deeply embedded part of human consciousness."

Scientists and even referees understand that the accuracy of calls increases with experience but experience does not necessarily get decisions right.

Kevin Gee, director of the Sports Vision Performance Center at the University of Houston College of Optometry, said, using baseball as an example: "You can train your eyes all day long to see as quickly as possible, but we're talking about 300 milliseconds to see a 95-mile-an-hour fastball coming from a professional pitcher's rubber to home plate."

Proponents of the use of technology to compensate for human limitations say that not to do so means that match officials are just going to have to live with error. On the other hand there are those who claim that human error adds to the game's drama and conversation.