Abstract
In sport, accurate eye movements are imperative to in order to successfully meet the demands of the sport. Saccadic gain (SG) demonstrates the accuracy of eye movements relative to the displacement of the stimuli, and is considered to be metric of choice when assessing saccadic accuracy. SG have not been assessed between athlete paradigms, nor between athletes and nonathletes. The purpose was to evaluate the SG differences between interceptive (INT) and strategic (STR) Division I athletes, as well as NON with an antisaccade task (AS). Methods: Forty-two participants (14 STR, 14 INT, and 14 NON) performed 2 trials of a 20° AS. Data were exported into MATLAB where saccadic gain was calculated as the average peak amplitude of at each individual saccade divided by 20°. One one-way ANOVA was calculated to assess the differences between the 3 groups over the single condition. Results: There was a significant omnibus result for saccadic gain between the three groups (F2,39=4.05;η2=0.172;p<0.05). Post-hoc analysis revealed that STR (0.81±0.09) were reported to have significantly lower SG values than NON (0.89±0.08; p<0.01). INT did not significantly differ in SG between STR (p=0.438) and NON (p=0.055). Research has noted that pre- and post- exposure to an AS task training can cause SG to go from hypermetric to hypometric. This has been suggested to be a speed-spatial accuracy trade off. This could explain the smaller saccadic gain in the STR.