Guest Editorial: Visual Function and Sports Performance

Abstract

Remarkable athletic feats often invoke questions from observers about how these achievements are possible. In baseball, softball, and cricket, how does a batter achieve the remarkable temporal and spatial accuracy in their swing necessary to successfully bat the ball, all while under severe timing constraints? How does a soccer player moving at full speed "thread the needle" with a perfectly placed pass between defenders? Sports are necessarily designed to test the limits of human abilities, and given the vital role of vision in sport, it is important to consider how visual abilities enable or constrain sports performance.The overarching topic in this feature issue is the role of vision in sports performance. This area is clearly of growing interest, with 73% (1985/2713) of the citations returned in PubMed for the search terms "sports" and "vision" occurring since 2010 (on May 1, 2021). As further evidence of the interest and enthusiasm for sports vision, the International Sports Vision Association was formed to advance the field of vision assessment and training for athletes, and the Journal of Sports and Performance Vision began publishing research articles on these topics in 2019. Because sports vision encompasses a wide array of subject matters, the sports vision literature is understandably disseminated throughout many diverse journals that may or may not be devoted solely to vision. These journals are centered around topics including vision science, cognition, kinesiology and biomechanics, sports science, neuroscience, learning, and both ocular and systemic clinical issues.The goal of this feature issue is to bring together studies that cover a variety of topical areas in sports vision. There are articles on vision assessments, vision correction and eye protection, cognitive-perceptual issues, vision training, concussion, and retinal physiology. Key questions for sports vision practitioners that are addressed in this feature issue include the following: what visual or vision-related attributes may underpin success in a particular sport, what cues are used by athletes to compete successfully in their sport, what visual assessments are best to measure an athlete's current level of development and to estimate his/her future potential, and which training methods and training environments (e.g., virtual or on-field) result in optimal transfer to athletic competitions. In keeping with the global reach of sports, the articles in this feature issue were contributed by authors from Australia,

Studies of Vision in Cricket—A Narrative Review

“…For example, clear vision and dynamic stereopsis would help in assessing kinematic cues and optical cues for hitting and fielding. In studies on cricket, these low-level skills have generally been assessed in a domain-general manner by comparing the visual skills of athletes to the wider population [ 18 , 19 ]. A variant of this approach has also been employed in which visual skills of players at higher and lower levels are compared.…”