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psychophysics drives baseball and other sports performance

Posted by LPTrofatter on 20 Jan 2012 at 01:51 GMT

The coach sets performance goals for the players on the field, but it is what is going on inside the brain and the benefit of training neural networking that may provide the performance edge for a winning season. Kudos to Clark et al for recognizing and systematically approaching visual motor training as part of training and conditioning. Too often we hear "keep your eye on the ball," but Clark's article on high-performance vision training is perhaps more accurate and keeping with Tim Robbin's quote to "keep your eye on the ball, even when you can't see the ball." The specific training and longitudinal tracking of visual motor performance including tracking, reaction time, convergence, accommodation provides specific markers that can be evaluated relative to performance, and potentially predictive of performance by coaches and players. Just as strengthening and endurance training improve muscle performance, eye-hand training improves psychomotor performance. Considering the current theories and studies of visual processing it would be assumed that the use of visual training methods as described in this paper would lead to better dynamic peripheral awareness, and improved context-dependent responsiveness and control during target type activities such as baseball. The team and conference statistics support this correlation. It would be of considerable interest to see what other team statistics changed for this reporting period: On field collisions? In-field and out-field errors? Steals? Concussions? Of the methods used, it would similarly be interesting to see how much improvement was appreciated over baseline values during the pre-season and in-season periods.

No competing interests declared.