Ziping Liang */**/***, Desheng Yin */**/***, Ting Liu */**/***, Ziliang Zhu */**/***, Huiyan Lin **** and Hua Jin */**/***
(*) Key Research of Humanities and Social Science of the Ministry of Education, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, China
(**) Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, China
(***) Center of Collaborative Innovation for Assessment and Promotion of Mental Health, Tianjin Normal University, China
(****) Institute of Applied Psychology, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China
Citation
Liang, Z., Yin, D., Liu, T., Zhu, Z., Lin, H., Jin, H. (2021). High perceptual sensitivity to global motion in badminton players. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 52(1), 90-100. doi:10.7352/IJSP.2021.52.090
Abstract
Global motion perception (GMP) is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. Previous studies found that action video gamers had better GMP. However, it is still under debate whether ball playing, particularly badminton playing, can improve the sensitivity of GMP. To address this issue, 24 professional badminton players, 24 sprinters and 24 non-player controls were recruited to perform a GMP task, in which participants were asked to identify the global motion direction (leftward/rightward, upward/downward, contraction/expansion, or clockwise/anticlockwise) of randomly-presented dot kinematograms. Results showed that badminton players had lower motion coherence threshold than the other two groups in radial, rotational and up/down motion forms. In left/right motion form, the threshold was lower for the badminton players than for the non-players, but the difference was not significant between badminton players and sprinters. The findings suggest that badminton training may improve the sensitivity of GMP, and this increased sensitivity is irrelevant to general physical exercise.
Keywords: Badminton playing; Global motion perception; Perceptual learning