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Sunday, October 29, 2006

Saccadic suppression in hockey

So as per my usual laziness I'm not even going to read the source article and make wide sweeping generalization about the conclusions presented in this article (which may very well ignore whats in the actual journal article).
I think this stuff is actually pretty cool - there are a number of technical limitations which this group has overcome to 'watch' the eyes of athletes. Short of taking performance enhancing drugs there seem to be fewer and fewer ways of swelling the bodies of athletes - so it has become obvious that scientists of the mind may be playing a larger and larger role in sports performance.

In any case... onto a very obvious conclusion that hopefully the journal authors didn't miss but this story obviously did....actually I'll let you read the snippit of research before I tell you what 'actually' is happening. haha...

Simply put, they found that goalies should keep their eyes on the puck. In an article to be published in the journal Human Movement Science, Panchuk and Vickers discovered that the best goaltenders rest their gaze directly on the puck and shooter's stick almost a full second before the shot is released. When they do that they make the save over 75 per cent of the time.

"Looking at the puck seems fairly obvious," Panchuk said, "until you look at the eye movements of novice goaltenders, who scatter their gaze all over the place and have a much lower save percentage than the elite goalies."
...
"Goalies often focus on physical things like improving technique but they over-look the decision-making -- the cognitive side of things," Panchuk said. "I think this study shows that you also need to focus on your decision-making and your thinking processes. Having optimal focus is just as important as being in optimal physical shape."

Panchuk plans to continue the study by moving from wrist shots to slap-shots and penalty shots, where the goalie has even less time to react and make a save.


So... I admit it has to be really important that goalies or baseball players know what to look at - obviously - but the largest problem here with novice goal tenders is that they are simply moving their eyes around too much. And what happens when we blink or saccade? yes! suppression of vision! So imagine that during the 1 second a puck is coming toward you 1 eye movement is made - you've lost lets say 200ms of vision.
Now imagine you are a new goalie and you're looking everywhere and you make 4 eye-movements in the second a hockey puck is flying at you over a hundred miles an hour. You are now processing its trajectory for not 800ms but closer to 200ms! That hockey puck is gonna sneak up on you real quick - especially considering saccading messes around with your perception of time as well.

If you'd like a good paper that shows something similar in a different paradigm... here ya go :)
Boot, W.R., Kramer, A.F., Becic, E., Wiegmann, D.A., & Kubose, T. (in press). Detecting transient changes in dynamic displays: The more you look, the less you see. Human Factors.

And p.s.... sorry for ranting if this is all in the original article I'm way to lazy (ok...busy) to actually read it now.
ohh... p.p.s... here's some creepy hockey masks for halloween.

posted by Steve at 10/29/2006 08:00:00 AM  

1 Comments:

Brian said...

not to mention the fact that if you're keeping your eye on the puck to begin with, you'd likely be making smooth-pursuit movements instead of saccades (depending on the speed of the puck, I guess), whereas 'searching' for the puck would require saccades.

I think we talked about this the other day, but this seems like it'd apply to baseball as well. Batters get just a split second to see the ball, but apparently the ball 'looks different' depending on the type of pitch. A breaking ball apparently spins in a way that creates a red dot on the front of the ball (because of the seams of the ball). If you had to saccade toward the ball, you'd probably take too long to process the dot.

Gives a bit more meaning to the phrase "keep your eye on the ball"

Sun Oct 29, 01:03:55 PM CST

 

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