Abstract
Hitters in fast ball-sports do not align their gaze with the ball throughout ball-flight; rather, they use predictive eye movement strategies that contribute towards their level of interceptive skill. Existing studies claim that (i) baseball and cricket batters cannot track the ball because it moves too quickly to be tracked by the eyes, and that consequently (ii) batters do not – and possibly cannot – watch the ball at the moment they hit it. However, to date no studies have examined the gaze of truly elite batters. We examined the eye and head movements of two of the world’s best cricket batters and found both claims do not apply to these batters. Remarkably, the batters coupled the rotation of their head to the movement of the ball, ensuring the ball remained in a consistent direction relative to their head. To this end, the ball could be followed if the batters simply moved their head and kept their eyes still. Instead of doing so, we show the elite batters used distinctive eye movement strategies, usually relying on two predictive saccades to anticipate (i) the location of ball-bounce, and (ii) the location of bat-ball contact, ensuring they could direct their gaze towards the ball as they hit it. These specific head and eye movement strategies play important functional roles in contributing towards interceptive expertise.
Highlights
Spectators marvel at the ability of skilled hitters in fast ballsports
The elite cricket batters exhibited two key differences in their visualmotor behavior when compared to the club-level batters: (i) a superior ability to couple the direction of the head to the movement of the ball, and (ii) eye movement strategies that predicted the location where the bat would make contact with the ball
The ability to couple the head to the movement of the ball appears to be an important hallmark of expertise in batting. This may not be all that surprising: cricket batters are often coached to move their head towards the line of the ball, and batters are sometimes coached to rotate their head downwards so that the ball is hit when it is under their nose
Summary
Spectators marvel at the ability of skilled hitters in fast ballsports. Batters produce remarkably precise visually guided movements to hit balls travelling at speeds that test the limit of human visual-motor control [1,2], and they hit the ball despite late and unexpected deviations in its flight-path [3]. In conditions where it may be difficult to track the flightpath of the ball, predictive saccades are commonly used to move gaze ahead of the ball, or to catch up with it [4,6,7]. It is not clear why hitters do not track the ball throughout the entirety of its flightpath, though it is often said that the ball moves too quickly for the eyes to be able to track it [4,7,8]
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