How People With Vision Impairment Use Their Gaze to Hit a Ball.

Purpose: Understanding the impact of vision impairment on dynamic tasks requiring visual processing is crucial for developing effective adaptive strategies that support individuals with vision impairment in optimizing their performance in natural tasks. This study aimed to establish the gaze patterns used by individuals with vision impairment when hitting a moving target.

Methods: Nineteen tennis players with vision impairment were recruited and their eye and head movements were tracked while they returned tennis serves.

DyNamic Interactive Anticipation-Time for a Paradigmatic Shift.

Everyday human interactions require observers to anticipate the actions of others (e.g., when walking past another in a corridor or choosing where to hit a ground stroke in tennis).

Investigating the relationship between impairment and performance in goalball: A level playing field?

Currently, all eligible goalball players compete together irrespective of their level of vision impairment, yet it remains unclear whether those with more impairment are disadvantaged during competition. Following the International Paralympic Committee's requirement for evidence-based, sport-specific classification, this study assessed whether individual goalball performance relates to the level of visual impairment. Using results from the 2016 and 2020 Paralympic Games, players' sport classes and in-competition key performance statistics (minutes played, throws per minute, goals per minute, penalties conceded per minute, blocks per minute, and goals per throw) were extracted.

Periodic health evaluation in Para athletes: a position statement based on expert consensus.

Para athletes present a broad range of sports-related injuries and illnesses, frequently encountering barriers when accessing healthcare services. The periodic health evaluation (PHE) is a valuable tool for continuously monitoring athletes' health, screening for health conditions, assisting in the surveillance of health problems by establishing baseline information and identifying barriers to athlete's performance. This position statement aims to guide sports healthcare providers in the PHE for Para athletes across key impairment categories: intellectual, musculoskeletal, neurological and vision.

That's out! How expert umpires make leg-before-wicket judgements in cricket.

Despite evidence that elite-level cricket umpires are highly accurate in making leg-before-wicket (LBW) judgements, there is limited understanding as to how they make these judgements. In this study, we explored the explicit LBW decision-making expertise of elite-level cricket umpires ( = 10) via 10 individual semi-structured interviews. Using thematic analysis, we aimed to identify the sources of information that umpires incorporate into their decision-making process.

Running together influences where you look.

To read this article, you have to constantly direct your gaze at the words on the page. If you go for a run instead, your gaze will be less constrained, so many factors could influence where you look. We show that you are likely to spend less time looking at the path just in front of you when running alone than when running with someone else, presumably because the presence of the other runner makes foot placement more critical.

Eye Tracking to Assess the Functional Consequences of Vision Impairment: A Systematic Review.

Background: Eye tracking is a promising method for objectively assessing functional visual capabilities, but its suitability remains unclear when assessing the vision of people with vision impairment. In particular, accurate eye tracking typically relies on a stable and reliable image of the pupil and cornea, which may be compromised by abnormalities associated with vision impairment (e.g.

The effects of simulated vision impairment on performance in football.

Footballers with vision impairment (VI) are eligible to compete in the Para sport if they meet a minimum impairment criteria (MIC) based on measures of their visual acuity (VA) and/or visual field. Despite the requirements of the International Paralympic Committee Athlete Classification Code that each sport uses an evidence-based classification system, VI football continues to use a medical-based system that lacks evidence to demonstrate the relationship between impairment and performance in the sport. The aim of this study was to systematically simulate vision loss to establish the minimum level of impairment that would affect performance in futsal.

From Natural Towards Representative Decision Making in Sports: A Framework for Decision Making in Virtual and Augmented Environments.

Decision making is vital in complex sporting tasks but is difficult to test and train. New technologies such as virtual and augmented reality offer novel opportunities for improving decision making, yet it remains unclear whether training gains using these new approaches will improve decision making on-field. To clarify the potential benefits, a clear conceptualization of decision making is required, particularly for invasive team sports such as football, basketball and field hockey, where decisions are complex with many possible options offered.

Identification of "sleeping" talent using psychological characteristics in junior elite ice-hockey players.

Scouts search for "sleepers" who may be initially overlooked but ultimately exceed expectations. The psychological characteristics of those players are often neglected because they are difficult to observe, but hold promise to identify sleepers given for example the self-regulation and perceptual-cognitive skills that those developing players might need to flourish. The aim of this study was to examine whether sleepers could be retrospectively identified using psychological characteristics.

Skilled deceivers are better action perceivers and vice versa.

Skilled actors rely on deception to disrupt the perceptual ability of opponents who seek to anticipate action intentions. Common-coding theory (Prinz, 1997) purports that action and perception share common origins in the brain, and therefore it seems plausible that the ability to 'see through' a deceptive action would be associated with a capacity to perform the same action. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to perform a deceptive action would be related to the ability to perceive the same type of action.

Virtual reality as a representative training environment for football referees.

Visual experience plays an important role in facilitating referee decision-making. Video training can be used to train these perceptual-cognitive skills in discrete scenarios, for instance in foul situations in football, but is less suitable in other instances such as when seeking to make decisions in open-play scenarios due to a lack of representativeness. Recent technological advances enable the use of virtual reality (VR) to replicate game situations in a controlled and realistic manner.

Profile of Athletes With a Vision Impairment: Exploring Demographics and Ocular Pathologies of Athletes in Three Paralympic Sports.

Objective: This study aimed to explore the profile of athletes with a vision impairment who compete in three Paralympic sports (goalball, vision impairment judo, and blind football).

Design: Descriptive and association analyses of the vision impairment athletes' profile were conducted.

Results: The typical athlete profile was a male (65.

Impact of Running With and Without a Guide on Short Distance Running Performance for Athletes With a Vision Impairment.

Objective: This study aimed to investigate the difference of running with or without a guide on running performance (100, 200, and 400 m) for athletes with a vision impairment.

Design: Data including athletes' and guides' sex, age, and race times were extracted from 11 elite competitions.

Results: Male athletes predominantly ran without a guide (100 m = 91.

Expert Views on Evidence-Based Classification for Goalball: A Delphi Study.

Para sport classification aims to minimize the impact of impairments on the outcome of competition. The International Paralympic Committee requires classification systems to be evidence based and sport specific, yet the sport of goalball uses a structure that is not supported by evidence demonstrating its legitimacy for competition. This study aimed to establish expert opinions on how a sport-specific system of classification should be structured in the sport of goalball.

Optimal integration of kinematic and ball-flight information when perceiving the speed of a moving ball.

In order to intercept a moving target such as a baseball with high spatio-temporal accuracy, the perception of the target's movement speed is important for estimating when and where the target will arrive. However, it is unclear what sources of information are used by a batter to estimate ball speed and how those sources of information are integrated to facilitate successful interception. In this study, we examined the degree to which kinematic and ball-flight information are integrated when estimating ball speed in baseball batting.

Are predictive saccades linked to the processing of peripheral information?

High-level athletes can predict the actions of an opposing player. Interestingly, such predictions are also reflected by the athlete's gaze behavior. In cricket, for example, players first pursue the ball with their eyes before they very often initiate two predictive saccades: one to the predicted ball-bounce point and a second to the predicted ball-bat-contact point.

Perceived Facilitators and Barriers to Participation in Golf for People With Vision Impairment: A Qualitative Study.

Objectives: This study aimed to identify facilitators and barriers to participation in vision impaired golf.

Design: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 12 vision impaired golfers, 10 guides, and 5 novices during the British VI Golf Open tournament in August 2021.

Results: Qualitative content analysis identified the benefits, facilitators, and challenges of playing vision impaired golf.

Home advantage and LBW decisions: The contribution of umpiring to the home-ground (dis)advantage in cricket.

Objectives: This study aimed to determine whether elite cricket umpires' decisions contribute to home advantage via leg-before-wicket decisions.

Design: Leg-before-wicket decisions (n = 4971) from actual elite level cricket matches in Australia between 2009 and 2016 were analysed using a binomial logistic regression to predict the umpires' leg-before-wicket decisions.

Methods: Regressions were performed to determine whether the batter's team (home or away) influenced the likelihood that the umpire would give them out leg-before-wicket.

Predictors of selection into an elite level youth football academy: A longitudinal study.

Talent identification in football is complex. Research regarding talent indicators that predict selection into professional academies is increasingly multi-disciplinary, though is typically cross-sectional, failing to consider whether the of those indicators influences selection. The aim of this study was to determine if longitudinal changes in talent indicators are associated with selection into a professional football academy.

The Relationship Between Visual Function and Performance in Para Swimming.

Background: Paralympic swimmers with vision impairment (VI) currently compete in one of the three classes depending on their visual acuity (VA) and/or visual field. However, there is no evidence to suggest that a three-class system is the most legitimate approach for classification in swimming, or that the tests of VA and visual field are the most suitable. An evidence-based approach is required to establish the relationship between visual function and performance in the sport.

Laterality and performance: Are golfers learning to play backwards?

When using a bimanual tool to strike an object, most people place their preferred hand closer to the striking end. In sports, a player is deemed to adopt a "right- or left-handed" stance depending on the hand that is lower on the club or bat. Research has suggested there is an advantage in going against this convention by placing the preferred hand at the top in a "reversed-stance".

Review: Sport Performance and the Two-visual-system Hypothesis of Vision: Two Pathways but Still Many Questions.

The two-visual-system hypothesis (TVSH) provides a framework for understanding the nature of the visual information athletes are likely to rely on during competition. If valid, the framework provides a valuable means of evaluating the likely efficacy of different vision training tools that claim to improve the sport performance of athletes.The TVSH has been used to explain that many of the existing methods of testing and training vision may be ineffective to improve on-field sport performance.