Sports vision training: A review of the state-of-the-art in digital training techniques

ABSTRACT

Athletes need excellent vision to perform well in their sports, and many athletes have turned to vision training programs as a way to augment their traditional training regimen. The growing practice of ‘sports vision training’ relies on the notion that practice with demanding visual perceptual, cognitive, or oculomotor tasks can improve the ability to process and respond to what is seen, thereby improving sport performance. This enterprise is not necessarily new, but has been advanced greatly in the past few years by new digital technology that can be deployed during natural training activities, by perceptual-learning-inspired training programs, and by virtual reality simulations that can recreate and augment sporting contexts to promote certain sports-specific visual and cognitive abilities. These improved abilities may, in turn, instill a competitive advantage on the playing field, underscoring the potential value of these approaches. This article reviews emerging approaches, technologies and trends in sports vision training. Where available, critical review of supporting research is provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Enhancement
• learning
• perception
• simulations
• sports vision training

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Bronson Hamada, Joan Vickers, and Uri Polat for their thoughts and insight into research with the training tools described in this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Rajan Khanna, Matthew DeLang, Kelly Vittetoe and Ben Ramger for their input on drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

L.G.A. does not have any commercial, proprietary or financial interest in any device, equipment, or instrument related to this article. G.E. is a paid consultant to Senaptec LLC.

Notes

1. Though it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all of the historical approaches to SVT, the reader may wish to see Ciuffreda and Wang (2004) for an elaborated review of the training of component visual skills for sports, as well as West and Bressan (1996), Hopwood, Mann, Farrow, and Nielsen (2011), Jenerou, Morgan, and Buckingham (2015), and Schwab and Memmert (2012) for more examples of SVT intervention studies.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by grant support to L.G.A. through the United States Army Research Office [grant number W911NF-15-1-0390].