AAAAIIEEE! Tennis Players' Grunts May Help Their Game

Those unearthly howls, shrieks, and grunts that burst out of tennis players' mouths may do more than just fill the silence of tennis stadiums. A new study suggests that a player's grunt might slow down the response time of her opponent, giving the grunter an advantage. For the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers asked students to watch videos of a tennis player hitting a ball; some shots were accompanied by a soft grunt, others were performed in silence. For each shot, the student had to indicate which side of the court the ball would land on by hitting a keyboard key. According to the study, "The results were unequivocal: The presence of an extraneous sound interfered with a participants' performance, making their responses both slower and less accurate." Of course, highly trained, professional tennis players might be less thrown by the noises than college students sitting in ...