"Professional sports are the playgrounds of the physically gifted. But size, speed, and strength aren't the only factors that matter. For all of the tall, fast, and chiseled elite athletes, there are a few who look, well, like the rest of us. Soccer's Diego Maradona, basketball's Steve Nash, and hockey's Wayne Gretzky come to mind. Yet despite these athletes' comparatively unexceptional physical attributes, they still reached the pinnacle of performance in their respective arenas. What, then, sets them apart?"
"More than four decades ago, Joan Vickers developed a hypothesis. This inkling emerged when Vickers was a PhD student learning from some of the greatest cognitive scientists of all time, including Anne Treisman and Daniel Kahneman. From perception psychologist Stan Coren, she learned how to record eye movements with sophisticated trackers. In that lab, she thought back to her past dalliances with greatness in her own small corner of the sporting world."
"There were a few rare instances in which she performed far beyond her usual capabilities. In one basketball game, she simply couldn't miss a shot. And during one volleyball match, she served out an entire game. In those moments, she was absolutely sure she had mastered the sports. Alas, her brushes with athletic brilliance proved fleeting. "It was all gone the next day!""
Joan Vickers proposed that differences in how athletes use their eyes and visual attention, not only physical attributes, underlie exceptional performance. Vickers' sporting experience included varsity volleyball and basketball, and she recalled brief episodes of effortless excellence that vanished afterward. As a PhD student, Vickers trained with cognitive scientists and learned eye-movement recording techniques from Stan Coren. She hypothesized that skilled performers deploy distinct visual search strategies. To test this, Vickers presented gymnasts of varying skill levels with sequences of gymnastic images while recording eye movements from a stabilized head position with a chin rest and sophisticated trackers.
Read at Big Think
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