This document provides a summary of a presentation on the role of vision in sports and the effect of visual training on sports vision and performance. The presentation reviews current literature on sports vision, including the sports vision pyramid model comprising the visual hardware, software, perception-action cycle, and on-field performance. It discusses various aspects of sports vision like visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, decision training, and the quiet eye. The presentation aims to identify gaps in research and bring economic benefits to vision training in sports.

1. “The Role of Vision in Sports and the Effect
Visual Training has on Sports Vision, and
Sports Performance.”
Presented By : Mark Cobbler
Humboldt State University
KINS 492 Senior Seminar
Fall 2014

2.  “The Role Of Sports Vision In Eye Care Today”
-David G. Kirschen & Daniel L. Laby
 “Visual Acuity and Contrast Sensitivity Testing for Sports Vision
“
-Aaron B. Zimmerman , Kimberly L. Lust, Mark A. Bullimore
 “The Relationship of Vision and Skilled Movement “
-Pierre Elmurr
 “From Vision to Decision: The Role of Visual Attention in Elite
Sports Performance “
-Brian T. Miller & Welsey C. Clapp

3.  To provide a review on current literature about sports
vision, the various aspects related to vision and how they
relate to athletic performance.
 History
 The Sports Vision Pyramid
 Hardware
 Testing, Correction
 Software
 Sport Specific Variables
 Perception – Action Cycle
 Performance Vision Testing
 Vision Training
 “The Quiet Eye”
 Training Equipment/Enhancement

4.  Secondary Purpose:
 To identify gaps in literature and bridge the gap
between disciplines to form a new area of study in
kinesiology with emphasis on vision and
performance.
 Bring to fruition the potential economic benefits of
vision training in sports.

5.  Initial focus was protection, has steadily evolved over recent
years to focus on visual function to elite performance.
 What started it all? “The Great Bambino” 1921
 How does he do that!?

7.  By mid 1990’s there was still very little
research and publications available, but
interest in this new area of performance
steadily increased.
 Systematic Approach was developed to
better understand components of sports
vision and help guide research.
 Each block from bottom up contributes to
its preceding block and helps provide
overall stability of the structure.
 Base Layer – Individual mechanical
function of eyes
 2nd Layer – How the eyes function together
 3rd Layer – How the brain uses visual
information gathered from first 2 layers
 4th Layer – On Field Performance
IMPORTANT
 Attempting to train visual mechanics
level of the pyramid before the first
two levels are optimized is not
adequate to yield results and can be
counter-productive.

8.  The first type of vision information processing goes
through the “hardware” of the eye, the mechanical
functionality.
 Two major components of interested for hardware
related to sports vision(base of sport vision pyramid)
fundamentals of visual performance; Contrast
Sensitivity & Visual Acuity.
 Contrast Sensitivity – Contrast sensitivity is the
individual’s ability to detect low-contrast objects of
various sizes.
• Pelli-Robson Chart used to test contrast sensitivity.
consists of 5-cm-high letters of decreasing contrast.
• Other Contrast Sensitivity Charts available
• The Mars Letter Contrast Sensitivity Test is a smaller more
portable derivative of the Pelli–Robson chart.
• Pelli–Robson and Mars charts demonstrated similar
repeatability and showed good agreement. The Mars
test may be more practical in the sports vision setting
because it is much more portable and durable.

9.  Visual Acuity - Visual acuity is a measure of an
individual’s ability to resolve fine detail, that is, what is the
smallest black-on-white letter that a subject can identify.
• An individual’s visual acuity is physiologically limited optically,
retinally, and cortically; meaning our eyes ability to function
adequately is affected by the mechanical mechanism of the eye.
• There are numerous methods used to test visual acuity. The
most common method used is recognition acuity or resolving an
optotype in which the patient is familiar with the target.
• The most repeatable and standardized method of measuring
visual acuity is through the use of logMAR charts. Two types of
logMAR are commonly used:
 The Bailey–Lovie chart and the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy
Study (ETDRS) chart, these have become standard in clinical settings.
• Correction in visual acuity abnormality can be done surgically or
with corrective lenses

10.  The second type of visual information processing involves the perception of visual
information that is influenced by the strategies an athlete develops through
experience, which results in processing the incoming information more efficiently.
(3rd level of sports vision pyramid)
 Software aspects of sports vision includes information processing strategies,
encoding and retrieving perceptual information from memory, extracting relevant
information from both advance cues and ball flight cues, and the use of
anticipatory skills.
 There are numerous ‘‘software’’ skills that differentiate an expert from a novice,
which includes, pattern recognition, interceptive timing, fixation, and visual
attention.
 Important neural pathways located in the optical lobe send information to the
frontal lobe . Within the lobe are two forms of visual processing—dorsal and
ventral.
 Dorsal - The dorsal stream is responsible for orienting the gaze and
sustaining attention at one location. It is also responsible for the rapid
processing and updating of information that is important for orientation in
space and movement. Known as the ‘‘where’’ pathway because it directs
attention to locations in space.
 Ventral - It is also known as the ‘‘what’’ stream and is associated with the
cognitive processing of information and higher executive processes. It is
responsible for assigning meaning to objects and events, and it guides the
anticipation and planning of actions. The dorsal stream is adept at processing
information of short duration, but the ventral system requires time to carry
out its role.

11.  The perception–action cycle is a theoretical construct encompassing the
multilevel chain of neural operations that are required to effectively guide
action based on one’s multimodal sensory experiences.
 The brain is a dynamic and predictive organ that buys critical milliseconds by
increasing the efficiency and fidelity of visual processing in a proactive, as
opposed to reflexive, manner. This boost in efficiency contributes to a wide
range of on-field situations.
 Elite athletes face intense visuomotor demands requiring millisecond-
level decision making to convert vision into action. In fact, elite athletics
falls into a small class of human behaviors in which the perception–action
cycle is required to function under intense temporal demands but with an
incredibly high level of decision-making accuracy and action execution.
(i.e. split moment life or death decisions)

13.  Athletes can demonstrate different principles of visual attention
and visuomotor integration at play during game time situations.
 At any given moment on the field, an athlete is bombarded with a
barrage of visual information about rapidly changing situations on
the field. The visual system, however, has inherent capacity
limitations. Visual inputs reflecting the location of the ball in space,
positions of teammates, threats posed by defenders along with
extraneous information (e.g., the crowd) all compete for these
limited resources of the visual system.
 Amid this continuous influx of visual signals, only a small subset
of inputs are particularly relevant for the athlete’s ongoing action
selection. A fundamental challenge for goal-directed behavior
generally, and on-field sports performance in particular, is the
brain’s need to manage the capacity limitations of vision by
favoring the neural representation of those inputs that are most
relevant for current action.
 By limiting neural resources to those incoming inputs that are most
critical for current action, the brain ensures that the athlete has the
most sensitive representation of the most important features in his
or her environment to guide decision making.

14.  To increase the efficiency of the perception–action cycle and to
manage extreme situations such as on-field athletics, the brain
evolved a set of mechanisms that speed up perception by
leveraging two different knowledge sources to guide
predictions:
 Knowledge from past experience
 Knowledge about current goals and means to those goals
 The impact of bringing in this extra information is that
humans are better and faster at recognizing objects in the
visual world when they know something in advance about the
features or potential location of the relevant target.
 Baseball batter attempting to hit a fastball Vs. Quarterback
dropping back for a pass

15.  Using the sport specific task analysis helps guide vision testing in athletes.

16.  Evidence suggest that variables of the “software” system can be tested, to
determine correlations in performance of athletes across different sport
specific tasks. (i.e. Baseball Player – importance of hand-eye coordination
vs. dynamic visual acuity)

17.  There is a belief within the sports science research community that the
‘‘hardware’’ system has limiting factors in relation to visual–perceptual
training.
 ‘‘Software’’ training is a relatively new form of visual– perceptual training.
Two areas of interest are as follows:
 Decision training (off the field). Which can be further divided into:
• Postural cue training - which is video-based temporal occlusion training. A video is
presented of a performer executing a particular action from the player’s perspective,
with this section of the video it is then edited at a point just before the occurrence of a
particular cue. Participants are asked to respond by predicting the outcome of the full
play sequence P
• Pattern recognition training - which is concerned with teaching players how to
recognize, and subsequently anticipate, the outcome of familiar patterns of play as they
evolve.
 Gaze behavior—using the ‘‘quiet eye’’ research it teaches athletes fixation behavior
cues in relation to motor control in specific tasks such as the basketball-free throw.
 Gaze can be defined as ‘‘the absolute position of the eyes in space and depends on both
eye position in the orbit and head position in space.’’ (i.e. fixations, pursuit tracking,
saccades, blinks) Gaze control is defined as the process of directing gaze to objects
within a scene in real time.

18.  The overall response from the
‘‘hardware’’ and ‘‘software’’
systems produces visuomotor
control; this is the process whereby
visual (gaze) information is used to
direct and control movements.
 One gaze has emerged called the
‘‘quiet eye’’ as a significant
contributing factor to higher levels
of sports performance.
 The Quiet eye is defined as a
period of time when the fixation is
stable on spatial information
critical to effective and consistent
motor performance.

20. • Stroboscopic Training for Dynamic Visual
Acuity using Nike Vapor Strobe
• Trains dynamic visual acuity, cuts images
into slices, improves anticipation, the brain
will learn to predict the path of the ball.

21. • Former MLB player Mark McGwire used yellow tinted lenses toward the
end of his career and claimed that these lenses allowed for crisper vision
and a reduction in glare.

23.  The birth of a new discipline within Kinesiology.
 Sports vision contains multiple professionals with different scientific
backgrounds such as physicians, optometrist, neuroscientist,
psychologist, coaches, athletic trainers, performance coaches etc.. All
which contribute to the mutual goal of appropriate diagnosis in sports
vision. Many different discipline's research various aspects related to
sports vision, but there is still a divide, this gap has yet to be bridged.

24.  As of 2010 sporting goods equipment sales amounted to over
18$ Billion.
 Sports apparel = over 20$ Billion in sales
 Not included in these numbers are number of dollars per year
spent on gym memberships and athletic trainers.
 Recent estimates suggest that parents spend roughly $2,000-
$10,000 per year on their child’s sporting activities.
 Parents should be educated on the fact that vision is a pre-
requisite to their child’s success in sports and that appropriate
vision correction should be a standard part of a child’s
“equipment”
• Economics surrounding sports vision is promising.

25.  Still a void in this area of research
 Individual research on various aspects of eyes and
functions, not related to sports. The connection of
research has yet to be made.
 Scattered research across multiple specialties mostly
unknown to most sports vision practitioners.
 Research is still in its infancy, very little compared to
other aspects of sports performance.
 Testing is hard to provide real on-field situations in
order to gain accurate baseline of performance, most eye
test/training done in a lab or under controlled
environment.

26.  The sports vision pyramid is a good model describing the
hierarchy of the visual components necessary for superior sports
vision.
 Training the higher levels of the pyramid is predicated on having
the best possible corrected visual acuity and contrast sensitivity.
 “Hardware” less adaptable to training
 “Software” highly trainable
 Perception –Action Cycle- Dictates athletes ability to perform at
elite levels under intense stimulus
 Lots of testing available/new products, methods used to train
eyes becoming more available

27. • Sports vision concepts apply to everyone, even the fans. Don’t make
this same mistake. TRAIN YOUR VISION!

29.  Zimmerman, A., Lust, K., & Bullimore, M. (2011). Visual
Acuity and Contrast Sensitivity Testing for Sports Vision.
Eye & Contact Lens: Science & Clinical Practice, 37(3),
153-159.
 Kirschen, D., & Laby, D. (2011). The Role of Sports Vision in
Eye Care Today. Eye & Contact Lens: Science & Clinical
Practice, 37(3), 127-130.
 Elmurr, P. (2011). The Relationship of Vision and Skilled
Movement—A General Review Using Cricket Batting.
Eye & Contact Lens: Science & Clinical Practice, 37(3),
164-166.
 Miller, B., & Clapp, W. (2011). From Vision to Decision: The
Role of Visual Attention in Elite Sports Performance. Eye
& Contact Lens: Science & Clinical Practice, 37(3), 131-139.

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