Do Table Tennis Players Have Better Eye Movements?

Pierre Elmurr, BAppSc
Elaine Cornell, DOBA, DipAppSc, MA
Robert Heard, BA(Hons) PhD
Francois Kenny, School of Orthoptics, Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney

Previous research using qualitative measures of saccadic eye movements suggests athletes make faster and more accurate saccadic movements than do non-athletes. The latencies of horizontal saccadic eye movements were measured in a group of fifteen elite table tennis players and a group of non-table tennis players who had only a moderate involvement in sport. Subjects in each group had normal binocular single vision and little or no refractive error. To stimulate horizontal saccades a computer generated stimulus was presented at intervals of 0.5 and 0.3 seconds and at random horizontal amplitudes between 5-10. The resulting eye movements were recorded and analysed using an Ober2 infra-red eye movements system.
Results showed that, whilst the mean latencies of the table tennis players did not differ significantly from those of the non-table tennis participants, there was a group of table tennis players whose saccadic latencies were distinctly faster than the norm. These players demonstrated anticipatory saccades, i.e., they predicted, and initiated a saccade before the presentation of the stimulus. It was concluded that future research should use larger number of subjects and investigate the role of training in the development of anticipatory saccades.