The field of view is more useful in golfers than regular exercisers

摘要

Superior visual attention skills are vital for excellent sports performance. This study used a cognitiveskills approach to examine expert and novice differences in a visual spatial attention task. Thirtytwomales aged 18 to 42 years completed this study in return for course credit or monetary incentive.Participants were expert golfers (N = 18) or exercise controls (N = 14). Spatial attention was assessedusing the useful field of view task which required participants to locate a target shown 10°,20°, and 30° of eccentricity from centre in very brief presentations. At each degree of eccentricity,golfers were more accurate at locating the target than the exercise controls. These results providesupport for the broad transfer hypothesis by demonstrating a link between golf expertise and betterperformance on an objective measure of spatial attention skills. Therefore, it appears that sportsexpertise can transfer to expertise in non-sport related tasks.