Visuomotor Skills in Collegiate Athletes and Nonathletes

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Vision and coordination skills are necessary to complete daily occupations and activities. Effective vision requires a mastery of visuomotor skills and intact processing of visual information gathered from the environment. Health care settings use an array of visuomotor assessments and interventions to evaluate and treat disruptions in vision. The Dynavision (Dynavision International, West Chester, OH) is an emerging tool used to assess visuomotor skills. Numerous research studies have been conducted using the Dynavision as a visuomotor assessment for athletes and recipients of health care services (Clark et al., 2012; Vesia et al., 2008; Wells et al., 2014). The purpose of this study was to develop a fuller understanding of the role of vision and visuomotor skills in collegiate athletes and nonathletes.

METHOD: Forty-four athletes and nonathletes were assessed using a cross-sectional nonexperimental design to collect data on visual and visuomotor skills. Data were collected for eye dominance, visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, visual attention, manual dexterity, and reaction time. Quantitative data were collected using a protocol for visual assessments for eye dominance, intermediate visual acuity, near visual acuity, contrast sensitivity function, and simple and complex visual attention. The visuomotor assessments used were the Nine-Hole Peg Test for manual dexterity and the Dynavision D2 for reaction time. Researchers followed an established protocol for administering the visual and visuomotor assessments. Data were recorded on a customized form and input into IBM SPSS Statistics Version 23 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY) for data analysis.

RESULTS: Numerous significant correlations between variables were found at the .01 and .05 levels. Simple visual attention and complex visual attention correlated with median reaction time for Test 1, average reaction time for Test 1, fastest reaction time for Test 1, lower quadrants for Test 1, Nine-Hole Peg Test (right), and all five rings in Test 1.

CONCLUSION: Significant correlations were found between tests of simple and complex visual attention and reaction time results. On the basis of these findings, it is recommended that occupational therapists consider using visual attention assessments as an evaluation tool. These tests are inexpensive and quick to administer. Occupational therapy practitioners using the Dynavision should be aware that using faster settings may result in inaccurate reaction time results because the Dynavision records the speed of only the targets that are hit within the time requirement. The number of correlations found in the study support the use of these assessments for vision and visuomotor skills in occupational therapy practice.

References

Clark, J. F., Ellis, J. K, Bench, J., Khoury, J., & Graman, P. (2012). High-performance vision training improves batting statistics for University of Cincinnati baseball players. PLoS One, 7(1), e29109. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029109

Gao, Y., Chen, L., Yang, S., Wang, H., Dai, Q., & Chang, S. (2015). Contributions of visuo-oculomotor abilities to interceptive skills in sports. Optometry and Vision Science, 92, 679–689. https://doi.org/10.1097/OPX.0000000000000599

Vesia, M., Esposito, J., Prime, S. L., & Klavora, P. (2008). Correlations of selected psychomotor and visuomotor tests with initial Dynavision performance. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 107, 14–20. https://doi.org/10.2466/PMS.107.1.14-20

Wells, A. J., Hoffman, J. R., Beyer, K. S., Jajtner, A. R., Gonzalez, A. M., Townsend, J. R., . . . Stout, J. R. (2014). Reliability of the Dynavision D2 for assessing reaction time performance. Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 13, 145–150.