Table tennis players use superior saccadic eye movements to track moving visual targets.

Introduction: Table tennis players perform visually guided visuomotor responses countlessly. The exposure of the visual system to frequent and long-term motion stimulation has been known to improve perceptual motion detection and discrimination abilities as a learning effect specific to that stimulus, so may also improve visuo-oculomotor performance. We hypothesized and verified that table tennis players have good spatial accuracy of saccades to moving targets.

Transcranial static magnetic field stimulation over hMT+ inhibits visual motion discriminability.

Visuomotor performance acting on a moving target is fundamentally based on visual motion discriminability, and its neural basis is presumed to be human MT (hMT+), a motion vision center of the dorsal visual pathway. In this study, we investigated whether and how the accuracy and speed of motion discrimination are affected by applying transcranial static magnetic field stimulation (tSMS) to hMT+, which reduces cortical excitability. Sixteen participants performed a motion direction discrimination (MDD) task using a random dot kinematogram before (Pre-test) and during (During-test) application of the tSMS over left hMT+.

Individual Variation in Adaptive Ability of the Anticipated Postural Stability During a Dual-Task Single-Leg Landing in Female Athletes.

Background: Precise postural control helps prevent anterior cruciate ligament injury. However, it is unknown whether the anticipated postural stability can be improved during a physically uncertain and cognitively demanding task.

Hypothesis: Anticipated postural stability will improve through unanticipated single-leg landing with a rapid foot placement target tracking.

Acute exercise has specific effects on the formation process and pathway of visual perception in healthy young men.

Visual perception is formed over time through the formation process and visual pathway. Exercise improves visual perception, but it is unclear whether exercise modulates nonspecifically or specifically the formation process and pathway of visual perception. Healthy young men performed the visual detection task in a backward masking paradigm before and during cycling exercise at a mild intensity or rest (control).

Daily fluctuations in visual motion discriminability contribute to daily fluctuations in continuous visuomotor performance.

In ball sports such as table tennis, in which a ball moving at high speed is hit, an athlete's brain needs to process the motion information of the ball, predict the arrival point, and form a motor command to direct the racket there. Therefore, day-to-day fluctuations in visuomotor performance may be ascribed to fluctuations in visual motion discriminability, but it is not clear how the two are related. To examine this point, university table tennis players performed a motion direction discrimination (MDD) task and continuous visuomotor (CVM) task over 10 days as an estimation of visual motion discriminability and visuomotor performance, respectively.