You may be right that this is a stretch to apply to any one phenomenon, but from my studies on conciousness the findings of this paper are consistent with most of what I’ve seen. Basically the brain sort of tells us stories constantly and consciousness is more of an after effect. There was an explosion in the field of neuroscience with the high avalability of FMRI devices. The big experiment that seems to be repeatable is telling someone to make a desicion while watching their brain, and the watcher could predict the decision ahead before the decider had signaled their decision. Some experiments seemed to go further and show the brain made the decision before the person was aware of their decision.

> Anecdotally most of the time when a ball goes out of bounds both parties have a good sense of last touch and it's often validated by the third parties

In friendly pickup games it's extremely rare to see any confusion about who touched it last.

As competition heats up it's more common (but still rare) and almost exclusively limited to those who are playing most aggressively / competitively.

I'd put money on this phenomenon bring related to the desire to win. We see this in politics, arguments and other sports calls (that don't involve touch, like if a ball touched a line) as well where the desire to win seems to create a conscious or subconscious blind spot that allows us to be extremely confident in things that would benefit us regardless of the information provided to us.

And again I wouldn't be surprised if this phenomenon increases or decreases based on how badly we want to win.

Don't professional games generally have a faster pace? If so, that might be a factor.

Yes, but you can see this with kids competing too. Their desire to win seems inversely proportional to their honesty or rational observation of a call, to the point where it seems like they believe their slanted viewpoint and beyond just trying to manipulate the ref.