Abstrato

Prosaccadic and antisaccadic performance of the athletes in different types of sports

Alpaslan Yilmaz, Metin Polat

The perception of the visual environment plays the most prominent role for athletes of some sports types. Saccades are the fastest movements of eye balls to launch the image of any peripheral visual object to fovea. Some researchers previously reported that athletes have better saccadic performance than non-athletes. We aimed to investigate prosaccadic and antisaccadic performances of athletes from various sports, which have different visual field changing velocities. Totally 40 male athletes were divided into four groups (tennis players, volleyball players, basketball players, swimmers), and each of them included 10 athletes. 10 non-athletes were formed as the control group. Our results indicated that tennis players and volleyball players had faster prosaccadic velocity than basketball players, swimmers and non-athletes groups. We found shorter antisaccadic latency in tennis, volleyball and basketball players than non-athletes. Swimmers’ antisaccadic latency values were significantly different from neither basketball players nor non-athletes. We considered from these findings that gaining experience in some branches may improve planning of voluntary saccades and prosaccadic velocity. These improvements are evident in fast ball game players such as tennis and volleyball.