You probably recognise the feeling of grabbing a controller to play Call of Duty, Fortnite, or Halo, only to realise that the game controller doesn't work for you. The weirdo who played before you has it set to inverted (or doesn't have it set to inverted).
Your brain immediately goes haywire and it becomes almost impossible to play. So why do people prefer one setting over the other? Many people have come up with their own theories about why this is, such as that it depends on what you tried first, the idea that a stick above your head that you pull toward yourself (downward) means that you look upward and that this is therefore the most logical, while others claim that it is because you are used to flight simulations (which are often played with inverted controls). But... neither of these is correct.
Now, Dr. Jennifer Corbett and Dr. Jaap Munneke have published the final results of a report (via The Guardian) they produced five years ago while working at the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London. It's extremely detailed and based on numerous studies, and has a somewhat surprising answer to the question.
It turns out your preference is a "complex and often unconscious cognitive processes involved in how individuals use controllers" linked to how quickly you can rotate 3D objects in your mind. They admit that there may be people who had to learn to play one way or the other, just as left-handed people in the past were forced to write with their right hand, but explain that it is "much more likely that you invert or don't invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space."
It appears that those who play normally are simply faster at mentally rotating 3D objects, while those who play inverted do so more slowly but instead tend to get the correct result more often. Dr. Corbett concludes:
"None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted. It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.
"Though they tended to be faster, they didn't get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate."
And so we know. The report is well worth reading in its entirety and can be said to put an end to one of the gaming world's most long-running discussions. That being said, it will continue to be immensely frustrating to pick up a controller and realise that the camera isn't working the way you want it to.
<bild>Are you playing normal or inverted?</bild>