A team of Swiss researchers has just shown that tennis players have an overdeveloped vision that offers them multiple advantages on and off the court.
To reach this conclusion, Leila Overney and her team from the Federal Polytechnic School of Laussane (Switzerland) subjected a series of perception tests to 18 tennis players, 18 triathletes and 19 individuals who did not practice sports regularly, all of them men with ages understood between 21 and 38 years old. The results confirmed that tennis players are more accurate than other athletes when it comes to detecting and recognizing moving objects or estimating their speed . For example, they are much more agile when it comes to discerning on a screen which balls are traveling faster, something that is also useful in everyday tasks such as driving. However, this ability is only especially noticeable when objects arrive head-on, but not when they rotate or move away.
As Overney explains today in the journal PLos ONE , his research could help develop more specific training exercises for future stars on the track.
