Top Tennis Players Simply See Better
For most of us mere mortals, if an object was coming at us at 120-150 mph, we would be lucky to just get out of the way. Players in this week's U.S. Open tennis tournament not only see the ball coming at them with such speed, but plan where they want to place their return shot and swing their racquet in time to make contact. At 125 mph from 78 feet away, that gives them a little less than a half second to accomplish the task.
How do they do it? Well, they're better than you and I, for one. But science has some more specific answers to offer.
Swiss researchers have concluded that expert tennis players, like
their own Roger Federer, have an advantage in certain visual perception
skills, while UK scientists have shown how trained animals — and
presumably humans — can rely on a superior internal model of motion to
predict the path of a fast moving object.
For any sport that involves a moving object, athletes must learn the three levels of response for interceptive timing tasks.
- First, there is a basic reaction, also known as optometric reaction (in other words, see it and get out of the way).
- Next, there is a perceptual reaction, meaning you actually can identify the object coming at you and can put it in some context (for example: That is a tennis ball coming at you and not a bird swooping out of the sky).
- Finally, there is a cognitive reaction, meaning you know what is coming at you and you have a plan of what to do with it (return the ball with top-spin down the right line).
This cognitive skill is usually sport-specific and learned over
years of tactical training. Obviously, professional tennis players are
at the expert cognitive stage and have a plan for most shots.
But, in order to reach that cognitive stage, they first need to have excellent optometric and perceptual skills.
Leila Overney and her team at the Brain Mind Institute of Ecole
Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) studied whether expert tennis
players have better visual perception abilities than other athletes and
non-tennis players. Typically, motor skill research compares experts to
non-experts and tries to deduce what the experts are doing differently
to excel.
They carried out seven visual tests, covering a
wide range of perceptual functions including motion and temporal
processing, object detection and attention, each requiring the
participants to push buttons based on their responses to the
computer-based tasks and each related to a particular aspect of visual
perception.
In this study, which was detailed in the journal PLOS One, Overney
wanted to see if the perceptual skills of the tennis players were not
only more advanced than non-tennis players but also other athletes of a
similar fitness level, (in this case triathletes), to eliminate any
benefits of just being in top physical shape. To eliminate the
cognitive knowledge difference between the groups, she used seven
non-sport specific visual tests which measured different forms of
perception including motion and temporal processing, object detection
and attention. The participants watched the objects on computer screens
and pushed buttons per the specific test instructions.
The tennis players showed significant advantages in the speed
discrimination and motion detection tests, while they were no better in
the other categories.
"Our results suggest that speed processing and temporal processing
is often faster and more accurate in tennis players," Overney writes.
They even scored better then their peers, the triathletes. "This is
precisely why we added the group of triathletes as controls because
they train as hard as tennis players but have lower visual processing
demands in their sport."
Still, are the tennis players
really just relying on their visual advantage when given that half
second to react? Have their years of practice created an internal cognitive model that anticipates and predicts the path of an object?
Nadia Cerminara worked on that question. Cerminara, of the
University of Bristol (UK), designed an experiment that taught
household cats to reach with their paw at a moving target. If they
successfully touched the target, they received a food reward.
After training the cats to be successful, she recorded their neuronal
activity in their lateral cerebellum. Then, she measured the activity
again but would block the vision of the cats for 200-300 milliseconds
while performing the task. Despite the lapse in visual information, the
neuron firing activity remained the same as before. Cerminara concluded
that an internal model had been used to bridge the gap and provide a
prediction of where the object was headed.
The study was published in the Journal of Physiology.
So, when faced with a blistering serve, science suggests that players
like Federer not only rely on their superior perceptual skills, but
also have created an even faster internal simulation of a ball's flight
that can help position them for a winning return.
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Dan Peterson writes about sports science at his site Sports Are 80 Percent Mental. His Science of Sports column appears weekly on LiveScience.









