Visual Search Strategies of Baseball Batters: Eye Movements during the Preparatory Phase of Batting

Abstract

The aim of this study was to analyze visual search strategies of baseball batters during the viewing period of the pitcher's motion. The 18 subjects were 9 experts and 9 novices. While subjects viewed a videotape which, from a right-handed batter's perspective, showed a pitcher throwing a series of 10 types of pitches, their eye movements were measured and analyzed. Novices moved their eyes faster than experts, and the distribution area of viewing points was also wider than that of the experts. The viewing duration of experts of the pitching arm was longer than those of novices during the last two pitching phases. These results indicate that experts set their visual pivot on the pitcher's elbow and used peripheral vision properties to evaluate the pitcher's motion and the ball trajectory.

Visual Search Strategies and Decision Making in Baseball Batting

“…In contrast, the Nonexpert group mostly fixed their eyes on the pitcher's face and head. These findings were consistent with the previous results of Shank and Haywood (1987) and Kato and Fukuda (2002). Such visual behavior was similar to the behavior of various expert sport players, such as ice hockey goal tenders, squash players, tennis players, and soccer goal keepers (Bard & Fleury, 1981;Goulet, et al, 1989;Abernethy, 1990;Savelsbergh, et al, 2002).…”

Eye Tracking Methodology for Chemistry Education Research

“…Visual search has been explored in a variety of domains, including reading (10); diagrammatic representations, such as graphs, infographics, and schematics (65,66); medical test results (67,68); facial recognition (69-71); product labels (72,73); sports (74,75); and driving (76,77). Visual search has also been incorporated into several models for the comprehension of diagrams (for examples, see Just and Carpenter (78), Koedinger and Anderson (79)).…”

Anticipatory Judgment of Tennis Serve: A Comparison between Video Images and Computer Graphics Animations

“…However, the anticipation accuracy of the CG animation condition in both experiments was over the chance level (50%), suggesting that the participants were able to pick up the anticipatory information of serve direction from the CG animations. This led to the conclusion that CG animations would be a valuable tool to examine perceptual skills in tennis.Keywords: visual search, temporal occlusion, perceptual skills Paper : Psychology has studied when, where, and how skilled players extract visual cues, using approaches such as eyemovement recording (e.g., Kato and Fukuda, 2002;Savelsbergh et al, 2002;Williams et al, 2002), temporal occlusion (e.g., Abernethy et al, 2001;Farrow et al, 2005;Goulet et al, 1989), and spatial occlusion (e.g., Abernethy and Russell, 1987;Shim et al, 2006;Jackson and Mogan, 2007). Typically, experimental paradigms have presented video displays that simulate the player's perspective while he or she is facing opposing players (e.g., returning a serve in tennis or facing a penalty kick in soccer).…”