I thought I would not be able to see with them being under my helmet, in fact after a couple of balls I didn’t even notice they were there and I love the footage you get - Female County Cricketer
Often athletes are asked to engage in unrelated, isolated drills, to significantly increase their scan rates or told to have more focus, with the goal of improving decision making.
However, these approaches should be adopted with caution. If the bulk of training is unrelated or isolated in nature, athletes learn to adopt certain search behaviour skills to match those scenarios and not necessarily those that they will face during competitive performance.
Offering the instruction of increasing scan rates can be detrimental as it could lead to a lack of focus, which ironically contradicts the ‘focus more’ instruction.
It is accepted that during eye movement (saccade) you are not actually taking in information, it is only when you stop and focus (fixate) for approximately 100ms that information is processed. But how do we know this to share with such confidence? By using eye tracking technology in a variety of applied sporting settings to compare.
In cricket, the eye tracker fits perfectly under the helmet, not hindering the batter or bowler and allows the players to perform in their respective environments, which is pivotal to understanding their true search behaviours.
Once again if they were only worn during fabricated scenarios e.g. bouncing balls of reaction boards, solely using bowling machines or throwing a ball at a wall we would not gain true data to base our conclusions on to influence training.
Successful contact with the ball in cricket relies on learning cues of the bowler and not solely focusing on the ball. The latter strategy will only be successful up to a certain level and will not be effective once the ball travels above approximately 70mph.