9/9/15, "
Eye test to spot future sports stars," BBC, by Susanna Jolly
, Science reporter, Bradford
Researchers in Bradford are
looking for the link between visual processing and sporting performance. Their research could lead to a lab-based test that finds hidden talent and the cricket stars of tomorrow.
It
could also help elite sports teams to place individuals into their
optimum roles within the team, or plan specific vision training to
improve performance.
In cricket, fielders in the slips often have
less than half a second to respond and catch a ball travelling towards
them - all with the added pressure of a match- or series-winning, or
losing, moment.
This skill of tracking a trajectory, such as that
of an oncoming ball, and coordinating your movement to catch or
intercept it, is called "coincidence timing". It is pivotal in fast, dynamic sports like cricket, football and tennis.
A
team at the University of Bradford, led by Dr Brendan Barrett, secured a
£500,000 grant from the BBSRC
to see if there is any scientific link
between vision and coincidence timing. They have put elite cricketers and rugby league players through a battery of dynamic visual tests....
Members
of the public were also tested and divided into "sporty" and
"non-sporty" groups; over 400 participants were tested overall.
Eye on the ball
This
is not your average visit to the optician. Tests included repeatedly
attempting to count the number of dots on a screen after glimpsing them
for just 150 milliseconds (0.15 seconds).
Another involved trying
to catch a tennis ball travelling towards you at 35mph, wearing goggles
programmed to increasingly restrict your vision, while your movements
were tracked by infrared motion-capture technology.
This was a feat at which most of the elite cricketers excelled.
Dr. Barrett commented that a couple of "non-sporty" people had unexpectedly high levels of attainment.
However, no hidden talent was discovered among the assembled journalists today at the British Science Festival in Bradford.
With
collaborators from John Moores University, Liverpool and St Andrew's
University, as well as links with the England and Wales Cricket Board
(ECB), the team has collected all its data and started the lengthy task
of analysing the results, which should be available in the next year.
Dr Barrett said: "Our belief is - we have some
preliminary evidence - that
faster pickup of visual information is
extremely important in sports like cricket. Better performance on the
counting task and better performance on the catching task, matched with
evidence from the kinematics, [would be] strong evidence that the two
are linked."
If there are particular aspects of visual processing
that improve performance and are specific to the elite players, such
super-vision might be a natural or an acquired ability. "We don't know
whether this is an innate skill," Dr Barrett explained, "because [they
have done] many thousands of hours of practice. Once we find the link
then we will be able to explore it."
This research could pave the
way for finding hidden talent amongst children and encouraging them to
pursue sports in which they are likely to succeed.
It could also
help team selectors identify the best position for a player - for
example a player with excellent dynamic visual skills may be placed in
the slips rather than the deeper field.
Trying to gain that extra
1% or 2% at the top end of elite sport is crucial, and being able to
identify which players would benefit most from focussed training could
make the difference between winning or losing a match…or the next Ashes
series."
Image caption: "
The researchers used infrared motion-capture sensors to observe the catching hand and arm," copyright University of Bradford, via BBC
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Top sportspeople often seem to possess visual "superpowers", making near-impossible rapid reactions look easy.
