Contributions of Visuo-oculomotor Abilities to Interceptive Skills in Sports

Abstract

Athletes in interceptive sports are superior to nonathletes in their visuomotor skills. They also have broader access to various visual and complex visuo-oculomotor abilities than nonathletes. This likely allows athletes to more effectively coordinate visual and oculomotor abilities under demanding conditions when some visual cues are degraded. The present findings are consistent with a pyramid of sports vision and suggest a top-down process for athlete screening and training.

Visual function of English Premier League soccer players

“…Therefore, a reasonable explanation for the group differences reported here is that the demands of soccer, whether playing in a defensive or offensive position at an elite or intermediate level, do in fact favour participants with visual function that exceed those of healthy non-athletic adults. This conjecture is consistent with a number of studies that have reported differences in a range of visual abilities when expert athletes are compared with nonathletes (Di Russo, Pitzalis, & Spinelli, 2003;Faubert, 2013;Gao et al, 2015;Overney, Blanke, Herzog, & Burr, 2008;Voss, Kramer, Basak, Prakash, & Roberts, 2010). 2 An interesting issue for future work will be to determine if some of the advantages in competitive soccer players are related to more regular uptake of eye examination and use of optimal visual correction.…”

“…In terms of player position, we found that speed of accommodative-vergence facility (as indicated by near-far quickness) was significantly better in defensive than offensive players. Being able to quickly shift gaze and refocus between near and far locations is said to be important in dynamic sports (Ciuffreda & Wang, 2004;Coffey & Reichow, 1990;Coffey & Reichow, 1995;Gao et al, 2015), and has been shown to differentiate volleyball players (advanced vs. intermediate) from non-players (Jafarzadehpur, Aazami, & Bolouri, 2007), as well as being a predictor of actual performance in Division 1 ice-hockey players (Poltavski & Bidedorf, 2015). Results from a general vision training experiment with Olympic-level field hockey players, found that goalkeepers (i.e., defensive playing position) exhibited the greatest improvement in a "focus flexibility" task, which involved shifting gaze between near (arm's length) and far (3m) distance to read optotypes (Wimshurst et al, 2012).…”

“…Given the exploratory nature of the study and the novelty of the sample, we did not have explicit hypotheses regarding the visual function of elite compared to intermediate level soccer players (see also Klemish et al, 2017). However, in accord with the general finding that athletes have better visual function than non-athletes (Gao et al, 2015;Hazel, 1995)…”

“…The importance of vision and related processes (e.g., oculomotor control) in sport has long been explored and led many to suggest that enhanced visual function facilitates performance (Ciuffreda & Wang, 2004;Faubert & Sidebottom, 2012;Gao et al, 2015, Hazel, 1995Poltavski & Bidedorf, 2015;Voss, Kramer, Basak, Prakash, & Roberts, 2010). For this reason it has been recommended that athletes have regular visual function assessment (Erickson, 2007) and undertake vision training as part of their overall developmental program (Clark, Ellis, Bench, Khoury, & Graman, 2012;Deveau, Ozer, & Seitz, 2014;Kim, Seitz, & Watanabe, 2015).…”

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“…Apart from the motor system, physical fatigue also influences performance of other systems in the body. Fatigue, as a consequence of intense physical effort, can affect different aspects of visual performance and other visual parameters, such as visuomotor skills [7], contrast sensitivity [10], color vision [20] and intraocular pressure [15].…”