Champions Edge, LLC/SportsVisionNYC, New York, New York.
Optom Vis Sci. 2021 Jul 1;98(7):723-731. doi: 10.1097/OPX.0000000000001729.
Sports vision is an emerging field that seeks to establish the relationships between visual function and sports performance. Here we provide the first critical review of empirical studies that attempt to link visual assessments and vision training to competitive game performance.Vision is essential to producing controlled movement, and therefore, it is intuitive that better visual abilities should relate to better sporting performance. This notion has been central to the field of sports vision, an area of study that seeks to determine the visual skills that underlie optimal sports performance and investigate approaches to train these abilities to improve sports performance. Although this field now contains hundreds of published articles addressing visual assessment and training in athletes, relatively few have attempted to directly link these capabilities to on-field production statistics from competitive matches. The objectives of this article are both to describe the theoretical and experimental framework necessary for such research and to critically review the empirical literature that has attempted to directly link visual assessments and/or training to athletic performance. We begin by describing why such associations are important and then provide an evidence-based framework for evaluating the quality of research in this domain. This is followed by a summary and review of the qualified literature that has addressed either relationships between baseline assessments and game performance or the effects of visual training interventions on game performance. Based on this review, it is concluded that, despite promising evidence supporting the role of vision in sports performance and improvements due to training, the specialty is still in need of methodological improvements. It is recommended that studies aim for larger better-powered studies, consistent and precise outcome measures, and greater scientific rigor such as obtained through randomized placebo-controlled designs with pre-registration of hypotheses.
运动视觉是一个新兴领域，旨在建立视觉功能与运动表现之间的关系。在这里，我们提供了第一个对试图将视觉评估和视觉训练与竞技比赛表现联系起来的实证研究的批判性回顾。视觉对于产生受控运动至关重要，因此，更好的视觉能力应该与更好的运动表现相关，这一概念是运动视觉领域的核心，该领域的研究旨在确定支撑最佳运动表现的视觉技能，并研究训练这些能力以提高运动表现的方法。尽管这个领域现在包含了数百篇关于运动员视觉评估和训练的已发表文章，但相对较少的文章试图直接将这些能力与竞技比赛中的现场表现统计数据联系起来。本文的目的既是描述进行此类研究所需的理论和实验框架，也是批判性地回顾试图直接将视觉评估和/或训练与运动表现联系起来的实证文献。我们首先描述了为什么这种关联很重要，然后提供了一个基于证据的框架，用于评估该领域研究的质量。接下来是对已经解决了基线评估与比赛表现之间关系或视觉训练干预对比赛表现影响的有条件文献的总结和回顾。基于这一综述，我们得出的结论是，尽管有支持视觉在运动表现中的作用以及训练带来的改善的有希望的证据，但该专业仍需要改进方法。建议研究旨在进行更大、更有力的研究，使用一致和精确的结果测量方法，并采用更严格的科学方法，例如通过随机安慰剂对照设计并预先注册假设来获得。
