Verbs have tenses, designated past, present and future.

In conversation, the past tense and the future tense are safer than the present tense: the past is relatively difficult to cross-examine and the future is anybody’s guess.
In formal enquiries, and under cross-examination, the present tense usually means a wish to blur intentions and actions.
In a description of experimental results, use of the present tense exposes the fantasy that what happened in the past tense of the experiment generalises, and reflects researcher wishful thinking and peer review mediocrity in action, for example “Unconscious fear influences emotional awareness of faces and voices”, “Operculoinsular cortex encodes pain intensity at the earliest stages of cortical processing as indicated by amplitude of laser-evoked potentials in humans”, “Human Medial Orbitofrontal Cortex Is Recruited During Experience of Imagined and Real Rewards”, “Social personalities influence natal dispersal in a lizard”, “Representation in the Human Brain of Food Texture and Oral Fat” and “Causes of social reward differences encoded in human brain”, in which last experiment the sample size was three. The abstract “Gating of somatosensory evoked potentials during different kinds of movement in man” is written almost entirely in the present tense, and, in addition, the present perfect tense is used, which conveys that the responses shown by the subject during the experiment are continuing as the abstract is being read.

In live commentaries, the past tense and the future tense convey a difficulty describing what is happening now.

In historical commentaries, the present tense is an attempt to enliven.