VISION

Each kind of sports has its own specifics related to a variety of perceptual and cognitive skills such as estimating the trajectory of a tennis ball or its impact on the upper extremity holding the tennis racket. We will develop psychophysical and cognitive tests that allow to determine the lower limits of performance in the perceptual and cognitive tasks required to perform certain kind of sports. This will be combined with the measurement of brain activation allowing to determine those regions of the brain that are primarily involved in these functions.

SCIENTIFIC TOPICS

Psychophysical and cognitive tasks combined with high resolution EEG measurements

APPLICATIONS

Development of training procedures and eventually sport materials to improve the perceptual and cognitive skills and, hence, performance in a sport.

RESULTS

A battery involving 7 different perceptual tasks allowed us to identify the primary parameters that tennis players extract when they process information. Of primary importance, they performed significantly better than triathletes and non-athletes on temporal processing tasks such as masking (Figure) and speed discrimination of expanding dots (Figure). This is particularly interesting since they were not better at discriminating the speed of contracting or rotating dots. Tennis players were also significantly better than the other 2 groups at detecting a tennis ball in tennis-related pictures. However, they showed similar results as triathletes and non-athletes in detecting a tennis ball in pictures not related to tennis (such as pictures of landscape). They also showed similar results as triathletes and non-athletes on attentional tasks. Therefore, we can say that timing and speed are more crucial than attention for tennis players. We will now use those specific elements to propose new studies which will help improve performance in tennis players.

Masking threshold: Tennis players have a significantly lower threshold (i.e., they can discriminate the masked stimuli under serious time constraints better) than triathletes and non-athletes.

Speed discrimination threshold: Tennis players have a significantly lower threshold (i.e., they can discriminate the different speeds of dots better) than triathletes and non-athletes for expanding dots.

MAIN PUBLICATIONS

C. Fischer, L. S. Overney, M. Fauve, O. Blanke, H. Rhyner, M. H. Herzog, P.-E. Bourban, J.-A. E. Månson. What mechanical and dynamic properties should alpine skis possess? Ratings by advanced and expert skiers. Journal of Sports Sciences (Accepted).

L. S. Overney, O. Blanke, M. H. Herzog. Psychophysical limits of athletes in discrimination tasks with strongly limited processing time. Journal of Sports Sciences (In preparation).