News in Brief: Professional athletes have superior perception | Humans

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Home / News / February 23, 2013; Vol.183 #4

News in Brief: Professional athletes have superior perception

Soccer, rugby, hockey players better ignore distractions to follow motion with their eyes

By Laura Sanders

Web edition: January 31, 2013
Print edition: February 23, 2013; Vol.183 #4 (p. 18)

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Humongous hamstrings, bulging biceps and dangerous delts are obvious attributes of professional athletes. But the brain might be the most important asset on the field, a new study suggests.

Pro athletes are better at interpreting abstract moving scenes than are average people, reports Jocelyn Faubert of the University of Montreal. In his study, 102 professional soccer, rugby and hockey players completed a difficult perception task. To perform well, participants had to distribute their attention among multiple targets, ignore distractions, correctly perceive depth and follow lightning-fast dots on a computer screen.

The professional athletes outperformed both high-level college athletes and nonathletes, Faubert writes online January 31 in Scientific Reports. He does not know whether these superior perceptual skills are innate or learned over years of practicing the sport.

Comment

Citations

J. Faubert. Professional athletes have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning complex and neutral dynamic visual scenes. Scientific Reports. Published online January 31, 2013. doi: 10.1038/srep01154. Available online: [Go to]

Suggested Reading

N. Bascom. Brainy ballplayers. Science News. Vol. 181, January 14, 2012, p. 22. Available online: [Go to]

Comments (1)

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That's very interesting. And highly credible. Allow me to suggest one other factor: peripheral vision. Many years ago in Concord, MA I obtained contact lenses from someone who used to work with the Boston Celtics. He told me that Larry Bird, specifically, had the best peripheral vision he'd ever encountered. Bird could look straight ahead and do a precision pass to the left or right because he actually saw the court more clearly than most of us could. That tidbit stayed with me over the years. Our brains, of course, coordinate our actions by distilling and processing our sensory input. I'm suggesting that not only is the processing important, but the quality of the sensory input is critical also.

euonymous

Feb. 1, 2013 at 9:04am

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