Effects of Volleyball Training on Visual Time Perception

Abstract

Athletes excel in both movement control and sensory perception in their sport-specific domains since most sports are challenging both physically and cognitively. Experimental evidence has shown that superior visual skills must be cultivated to master a fast, time-constrained sport like volleyball. Time perception is a particularly crucial element of successful volleyball performance. However, less is known about whether visual time perception is one of these superior skills developable through volleyball training. Methods: The study details two experiments. In Experiment 1, we compared the performance in a visual time perception task across volleyball athletes, dancers and non-athletic controls. There were 20 participants (10 men and 10 women) in each group. It is hypothesized that volleyball athletes, but not the dancer experts, would have better performance than non-athletes in a visual time perception task. The relationship between volleyball training and visual time perception was further confirmed in Experiment 2, which had a longitudinal design meant to track performance improvements over an 18-week volleyball training regime oriented to novices. 28 female university students were recruited in this experiment. None of them participated in Experiment 1 nor had any experience of sports training. Of the participants, 14 (mean age=18.6 ± 0.93 years old) voluntarily joined the volleyball training program as an after-school sports activity. It is hypothesized that visual time perception performance of novices is improved after 18 weeks of volleyball training. Results: In Experiment 1, all participants had comparable accuracy, but only the volleyball athletes had shorter reaction time when compared to non-athletes. In Experiment 2, the performance changes over the 18-week period were significantly improved only in the volleyball training group and not in the control group in terms of both reaction time and error rate in visual time perception. Conclusion: A positive effect of volleyball training on visual time perception was observed by both sets of results. The present findings suggest that visual time perception is another domain-specific skill associated with volleyball expertise, and a potential training regime for better sports performance is discussed.