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Self-published
Visuomotor predictors of batting performance in baseball players (ICPSR 118141)
Released/updated on: 2020-03-08
We examined baseball players’ basic
visuomotor skills by measuring their eye tracking and manual control
performance, and then how these two capabilities relate to batting performance.
We tested baseball players and demographically matched non-athletes with an eye
tracking task in which they followed an unpredictably moving target with their
eyes and with a manual control task in which they used a joystick to control a
randomly moving target. Baseball players showed superior eye tracking and
manual control capabilities over non-athletes. Furthermore, both eye-tracking and manual control performance become more
correlated with batting accuracy with increasing player experience. Eye
tracking performance in particular is predictive of batting skill, accounting
for more than 70% of the variance in batting performance across players with 10
years of experience. Our findings suggest that the complex, learned skill of batting
is limited by fundamental visuomotor capabilities, and that this limitation
becomes more apparent with experience.