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Top tennis players see moving objects at high speeds |
Top tennis players like Roger Federer are simply better in certain visual
perception skills than others, and they are very fast at creating an internal
simulation of a ball's flight that helps position them for a winning return, suggest
new studies by Swiss and British experts. An article on these studies points out
that any sport that involves a moving object requires athletes to learn three
levels of response for interceptive timing tasks, namely optometric reaction,
perceptual reaction, and cognitive reaction. It would be an optometric reaction
if a person just sees a moving object drawing near, and gets out of the way. A
perceptual reaction would be when the person makes out that the object is a tennis
ball, not a bird swooping out of the sky. And a cognitive reaction would mean
that the person knows what is coming and has a plan of what to do with it, such
as returning the ball with top-spin down the right line. The article states that
this cognitive skill is usually sport-specific, and learnt over years of tactical
training. However, the write-up says, one needs to have excellent optometric and
perceptual skills to reach the cognitive stage. In a study, Leila Overney and
her colleagues at the Brain Mind Institute of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne (EPFL) carried out seven visual tests to determine whether expert tennis
players have better visual perception abilities than other athletes and non-tennis
players. The tests covered a wide range of perceptual functions, including motion
and temporal processing, object detection and attention. Each test required the
participants to push buttons based on their responses to the computer-based tasks,
and each related to a particular aspect of visual perception. Detailing their
findings in the journal PLOS One, Leila's team revealed that the tennis players
showed significant advantages in the speed discrimination and motion detection
tests, while they were no better in the other categories. "Our results suggest
that speed processing and temporal processing is often faster and more accurate
in tennis players," Live Science quoted Leila as having written in the study report.
Telling that the tennis players even scored better than the triathletes, Leila
added: "This is precisely why we added the group of triathletes as controls because
they train as hard as tennis players but have lower visual processing demands
in their sport." Another study by University of Bristol researcher Nadia Cerminara,
published in the Journal of Physiology, suggests that years of practice may have
helped tennis players create an internal cognitive model that anticipates and
predicts the path of an object. During the study, some household cats were taught
to reach with their paw at a moving target. If they successfully touched the target,
they received a food reward. Revealing the findings of the study, Cerminara said
that an internal model had been used to bridge the gap, and provide a prediction
of where the object was headed. |
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