Abstract
Skilled athletes pick-up task-specific information using specific patterns of eye movements that underpin their advantage over others (Land & McLeod, 2000). For instance, skilled tennis players use distinct eye-movement patterns to pick-up information from an opponent’s kinematics when anticipating their serve direction. However, it remains unclear whether lesser athletes can learn these eye movement patterns to accelerate their skill learning. The aim of this study was to examine the degree to which an expert-like gaze pattern could be learned to provide a performance advantage in sport. Nineteen recreational tennis players were divided into a gaze-training (n=10) or control-training group (n=9). All participants completed a three-day training intervention in VR where required to anticipate the direction of serves hit by an avatar but with the ball-flight occluded. After responding, the serve was replayed showing the ensuing ball-flight. Participants in the gaze-training group were shown, after every five trials during training, the gaze pattern of a skilled player without instructions (Smeeton et al., 2005) whereas the control-training group were not. All participants took part in an in-situ pre and post-test to assess changes in their gaze pattern against a real server on-court and to test any differences in the response time and accuracy of their returns. Results revealed that the VR gaze-training was effective in changing the gaze patterns of participants both in VR and in-situ against an opponent. Improvements in on-court response times were seen for participants in both groups (p < .01) without any change in the response accuracy (p = .19), but with no specific advantage for the gaze-training group (no interaction, p = .22). The findings show that VR gaze-training is effective in producing more expert-like gaze behaviour in VR and, more strikingly, that the changes are retained when returning serves on-court.