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 Playing a lot of tennis gives superior visual perception skills. Photo courtesy of photocase.com.
We all know that doing sports is good exercise, because we reduce our fat stores and instead increase our muscle mass. However, for top athletes this is not the only physiological improvements that occur during training. Extensive training over many years improves also the mental and cognitive abilities of the athlete so that he or she is better able to perform the tasks necessary to excel in the discipline. This is why that if you want to become a professional in almost any sport you need to start training at a young age. In a study published in PLoS One, Swiss researchers from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne have investigated the visual perception skills of tennis players.
The scientists tested experienced tennis players versus experienced tri-athletes and non-athletes on seven visual tests performed in front of a monitor. The tests were:
1) Coherent motion. A collection of dots were moving randomly on a black background and participants had to determine the consistent direction of motion for a subset of these.
2) Speed discrimination. The participants had to determine which of two moving dot backgrounds were faster.
3) Backward masking. The participants had to determine the displacement of a bar masked by others.
4) Tennis ball detection. Participants were shown scenes from tennis matches and other scenery and had to determine as fast as possible if a tennis ball was visible in the scene.
5) Pattern detection. Participants had to detect as quickly as possible whether a target pattern was visible in a complex scenery.
6) Attentional blink. Participants had to say whenever a target letter appeared in a stream of letters and had at the same time to press a button every time the letter x appeared.
7) Flash lag. Participants were briefly shown a blinking and a moving bar and had to indicate their relative position exactly when a flash occurred.
The results showed that the tennis players were performed better in the speed discrimination test, the backward masking test and the ball detection test (but only when shown tennis related photos, not for instance to find a tennis ball in a photo of a forest). In all other test there were no difference between the three group tested.
Thus the study revealed that tennis players improve some aspects of their visual perception such as the ability to determine speed and direction of approaching objects, but at the same time it shows that they, perhaps not surprisingly, do not perform better in other non-tennis related visual perception skills.
The researchers argue that perhaps tennis players ought to train these aspects of their visual perception early in their career to develop into even more talented players.
Source
Overney LS, Blanke O, Herzog MH (2008) Enhanced Temporal but Not Attentional Processing in Expert Tennis Players. PLoS ONE 3(6): e2380.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002380
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