Visual Program Improves Baseball Players' Game

Recently published research reports that baseball players can improve their vision with regular use of a computer game.

Baseball players on the team of the University of California at Riverside were recruited to spend two months using a computerized visual training game. The objective of the game was to find and choose visual patterns modeled after which neurons in their brains responded best to images on the screen. As the game continued, the patterns were made dimmer and dimmer, training the brain to recognize them with less and less input from the eyes.

Some of the players had vision that improved to better than 20/20. Study author Dr. Aaron Seitz was quoted by the Ivanhoe News Service as saying, "The demonstration that seven players reached 20/7.5 acuity—the ability to read text at three times the distance of a normal observer—is dramatic and required players to stand forty feet back from the eye chart in order to get a measurement of their vision."

What Is Different About the UC Riverside Vision Training Program?

The vision training program tried out on the UC Riverside baseball team is hardly the first "train your brain" vision enhancement routine ever created. Computer programs for vision training have been around since the days of Atari and Pac-Man. However, the UC Riverside vision training program is different in several ways:

• The UC Riverside scientists created a program that would have measurable results that everyone understands (at least if you play or watch baseball), runs batted in (RBI) and strike out percentages.
• The baseball players' training program didn't rely on just vision. The training program was multi-sensory. While the computer routine focused on improving visual pattern recognition, the end result of the game was not limited to just what they could see. Players also hear the ball.
• The program did not present the same task over and over again. The patterns were made dimmer and dimmer to increase the effect of training.
• The training was reinforced by real world tasks in a consistent fashion, by playing the game.

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More Training Is Not Necessarily Better Training

The players did 30 training sessions of 25 minutes each over a two-month period. No player did more than one training session per day. 

Neither did training interfere with the playing of the game. The researchers began training after the close of the 2012 Big West Conference baseball season and completed it before the 2013 season. Then the researchers used player stats from the two seasons to validate the results of the training. College players typically improve from year to year, and allowances were made for maturity in the game in the analysis of the data. The researchers concluded that vision training was responsible for four or five additional wins in the 2013 season.

Perceptual Learning for Improving Vision

As mentioned earlier in this article, many other programs use perceptual learning to improve skills that rely not just on vision but on other senses as well.

Attention weighting trains the brain to notice important features and to ignore unimportant features. This method is a key component of speed reading programs.

Differentiation trains the brain to notice differences in stimuli that previously had been considered as a unit. Most academic research has focused on using differentiation as a tool for improving skills in math and reading.

Stimulus imprinting trains the brain to notice specific stimuli, to scan a field of information for the one fact or feature that is critical for making a decision. People can be trained to read for specific words or phrases, or to look for specific kinds of quantitative information. Whole stimulus imprinting shortens the time required to find the pertinent information in a field.

Unitization trains the brain to see complex figures, numbers, and reading passage as a single unit, triggering a quick response.

Programs like RevitalVision use computer programs to generate simple images flanked by "Gabor patches," which are duplicates of the image designed to make the target more or less immediately visible. At first the brain receives visual inputs showing all of the images on the screen. Because the eyes have a physical defect, there is double vision, a mental picture of more objects than appear on the screen. But because the Gabor patches are subtly lighter or darker than the target object, the brain learns to eliminate visual "noise" and to focus on one image in the middle of the screen. Over 40 or 50 training sessions, the brain learns to ignore double vision and see the world as if vision had been corrected, even though it has not.

RevitalVision can also help people get used to corrected vision. People who have been nearsighted all their lives who get LASIK surgery can be confused by a suddenly clear image of the world. Their brains may be so used to the fuzzy, blurry vision provided by nearsighted eyes that clear vision is confusing. Perceptual vision training can eliminate the perception of halos, starbursts, and glare at night.

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Likewise, people who have surgery to repair cataracts may experience eyestrain when reading small print, or visual fatigue when driving, because their brains simply are not used to a clear image of the world. Perceptual training programs like RevitalVision can help the brain stop trying to compensate for poor vision that the cataract surgery has corrected.

Perceptual training programs are also available for treating other vision problems, but they are only available with a prescription from an ophthalmologist. Perceptual training for vision problems is not yet something you can use on your own for improving vision.