Visual training in sport: the map of 1,275 studies and the question of transfer

In brief. We catalogued 1,275 studies on athletes' vision, then set aside the 84 devoted to concussion. Of the 229 remaining training trials, 96 measure a real sports task and 14 a match or competition outcome. Transfer appears mostly when the training stays coupled to the action of the sport. Updated November 3, 2026.

Hello to you, the movement professional,

In 2018, a team from the University of Exeter reviewed 43 studies on commercial cognitive training devices, to judge their value in sport. Seventeen checked whether the gain carried beyond the laboratory test. Only one checked it on a sports task (Harris et al., 2018). The authors stayed cautious: the lack of evidence came mostly from the lack of trials conducted in sport, not from convincing null results.

We took up the question across the whole of athletes' vision. The inventory counts 1,275 studies published between 1957 and 2026, linked to their PubMed record when one exists, and 229 training trials once concussion is set aside. The question hasn't moved since 2018: when an athlete trains their eyes, what improves, the test or the game?

The objection comes right away, and it stands up: this work often takes place in front of a screen, far from the field. The numbers partly agree, since 70 of the 229 trials measure no sports task. But 96 measure one, and 14 go as far as the match or the competition. These are the trials the map follows closely: they show which trainings held up on contact with sport, and which stopped at the trained task.

Visual training in sport, sports vision, neurovision: what the studies are about

Three terms are in circulation. "Sports vision" is the established term for the study of athletes' visual functions, from acuity to gaze behavior in context. "Visual training" means any program that targets vision in the hope of improving performance. "Neurovision" has spread through the marketing of tools and courses, and it is the only one of the three that the sports literature doesn't use: it appears in none of the 1,275 studies in our inventory, and the few PubMed records that associate it with sport don't deal with visual training. Researchers speak of visual functions, eye behavior, perceptual-cognitive skills. We follow their categories.

The studies fall into three families. Observational studies describe what an athlete's gaze does, and the most numerous compare experts with novices on the same test. Training trials apply a program for a few weeks, then measure what changed. Reviews and meta-analyses bring the two together.

The scoping review by Lochhead et al. (2024) gives a first order of magnitude: 667 articles published from 1976 to 2023, including 547 empirical studies, of which 411 deal with visual assessment and 98 with training. Its scope was narrower than ours, which includes anticipation, decision-making and virtual reality, which probably explains a good part of the gap with our 229 trials. The systematic review by Buscemi et al. (2024), centered on the role of sports vision in performance, kept only 25 documents out of 476 and noted the absence of a standardized performance test.

This page maps the evidence. The exercises themselves, and their place in the session, are described in our article on oculomotor exercises in the warm-up for racket and team sports.

1,275 studies catalogued: who was observed, who was trained

The inventory was built in four passes: a first wave of 509 studies, a supplement drawn from other reading sheets, then two PubMed searches, one on racket and precision sports, the other on team sports (details in the counting method). 84 studies deal with concussion. They stay in the file but leave this map, because they belong to the care pathway. That leaves 1,191.

The literature is young and accelerating: 104 studies for 2025 alone, already 144 in 2026. Trials follow the same slope, 3 in the 1990s, 14 in the 2000s, 86 in the 2010s and 126 since 2020.

The rest of the table calls for more caution. More than two thirds of the studies are observational, and more than one in three compares groups, most often experts and novices: they tell what distinguishes an established player, without saying how they became one. Each study also carries a strength rating, assigned from reading its sheet or abstract according to the sample and the protocol: 1,006 are rated weak, 162 moderate, only 3 strong, and 20 could not be rated. This rating is ours. It doesn't replace a formal risk-of-bias assessment, but it gives the color of the terrain: many small samples, few replications.

Map by visual skill, from the periphery to the quiet eye

Each study was attached to one main category, the visual skill it measures or trains first. Many touch several (102 studies, for example, measure fixation as a secondary focus). The table counts the main category, so that the rows add up to 1,191. The "in the field" column counts the trials whose final outcome is a real task from the sport, with the positive trials in parentheses, then the mixed or null trials.

The basic oculomotor functions (pursuit, saccades, vergence and accommodation, fusion, vestibulo-ocular reflex) gather 200 studies but only 23 trials, of which 6 were measured on a sports task and 4 are positive. Smooth pursuit has been the subject of no training trial: we know how to measure it in athletes, we don't know whether training it changes their game.

The quiet eye, that last stable fixation before the movement, shows the opposite profile. Of 20 trials, 14 were measured on the sports task and 12 are positive. It is the category where training has most often been tested in contact with the movement, with the caveat of small samples.

Multiple object tracking has produced 17 trials, of which 5 were measured on a sports task, and none of those five is clearly positive. The heaviest category remains anticipation and decision-making, with 544 studies and 133 trials. It carries most of the question of transfer.

What comparisons between experts and novices establish, and what they leave blurry

The meta-analysis by Mann et al. (2007) laid the foundation with 42 studies and 388 effect sizes. Experts pick up perceptual cues better, with more accurate and faster responses; their gaze makes fewer fixations, longer ones, with a longer quiet eye. Eighteen years later, across 100 temporal occlusion studies, Song et al. (2025) put the experts' anticipation advantage at g = 1.15. This advantage transfers neither to a familiar sport nor to an unfamiliar one. Andrew and Causer (2022) find it again in 216 participants: facing penalty kicks on video, experienced soccer players do better than everyone else, while experienced players of invasion sports such as rugby, or of distant sports such as swimming, perform on a par with less expert soccer players.

The experts' advantage in visual search is less clear-cut than is claimed. In team sports, the meta-analysis by Silva et al. (2022) doesn't clearly separate experts from novices across 22 studies, with strong heterogeneity. That of Ma et al. (2026), on 26 studies in soccer, basketball and volleyball, keeps only a limited indication for fixation duration; the accuracy advantage disappears once publication bias is corrected. At the top of soccer, Caso et al. (2025) compared, in the Champions League, 18 award-winning players with 18 non-award-winning teammates, in the same match and on the same line: no difference in exploratory activity.

The question of causality remains. A difference between experts and novices describes what accompanies expertise, without proving that training it manufactures the expert. In 1,113 team-sport athletes, the meta-analysis by Yang et al. (2026) links multiple object tracking (r = 0.54), visual attention (r = 0.39) and visual search (r = 0.36) to sport-specific performance, with no significant link for depth perception (r = 0.09). The authors judge the quality of the evidence limited and call for studies able to establish causality. In soccer players, van Maarseveen et al. (2018) did not find that perceptual-cognitive tests predicted performance on the field. And in 410 professional players of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Laby et al. (1998) found no effect of crossed hand and eye dominance on batting average.

Mann et al. (2021) add a more fundamental reason. According to the two-visual-systems hypothesis, the pathway that guides action on the field might differ from the one an off-field test calls on, which brings back the distinction between the ventral and dorsal pathways. The authors themselves note that the central claims of this hypothesis are increasingly debated.

The families of visual training in sport and what they move

Six families of training recur in the inventory. For each, the reviews let us say what moves, and how far from the game. The counts per family come from the themes, which a single study can combine: they therefore differ slightly from those of the map by category.

General visual programs (111 studies, 66 trials) train visual functions outside the sports movement. Improvements appear on some visual tests, but they don't exceed those of a placebo group in the trials that had one (Wood and Abernethy, 1997; Abernethy and Wood, 2001). In 2021, a digital program tested double-blind in 32 university baseball and softball players did no better than placebo; 15 of the 16 athletes in the placebo group believed they were following the real program (Shekar et al., 2021).

Stroboscopic training (67 studies, 36 trials) intermittently occludes vision. Across 12 randomized trials and 415 athletes, it shortens time measures (standardized effect of -0.61) and improves accuracy (0.73) (Luo et al., 2025). On decision-making, the effect of 0.51 does not reach significance (Wang et al., 2025). Our analysis of stroboscopic glasses keeps 45 of them and details their protocols.

Multiple object tracking, most often in 3D (69 studies, 22 trials), has people follow several moving targets on a screen. The critical review by Vater et al. (2021), devoted to one of the most widespread commercial tools, finds no preregistered study, and only three far-transfer trials on ecological tasks, two of them without effect.

Quiet eye, occlusion, virtual reality: the families that come closer to the game

The quiet eye (98 studies, 20 trials) targets the last fixation before the movement. The meta-analysis by Lebeau et al. (2016) quantifies the gap between experts and novices (d = 1.04 across 27 studies) then, across 9 intervention articles, the effect of training on the quiet eye itself (d = 1.53) and on performance (d = 0.84).

Temporal occlusion cuts a video at different moments around the opponent's movement to force anticipation. It belongs to the large perceptual-cognitive family (513 studies, 99 trials). Across 12 interventions, Müller et al. (2024) find a large effect, with no difference between video and on-field transfer tests, the question of publication bias remaining open. As early as 2002, in recreational tennis players, video training with instructions and feedback improved anticipation in the laboratory as well as on the court, against a placebo and a control group (Williams et al., 2002).

Virtual reality and extended environments are rising fast: 57 studies in the review by Kittel et al. (2024), of which 67% published since 2020 and 28% interventions, decision-making being the most studied skill (60%). In racket sports, Liu et al. (2026) estimate the effect at g = 0.78 across 6 trials and 426 participants, but the prediction interval, from -0.01 to 1.57, includes zero: a new trial might show nothing. See virtual reality and decision-making in sport.

Transfer to the field, counted trial by trial

We sorted the 229 trials by what they measure at the end. 96 measure a real task from the sport, outside video and outside the laboratory: a field test, a small-sided game, statistics, a competition. 41 stop at a video or laboratory task linked to the sport, and 6 at a reactive agility test, halfway between. 70 measure no sports task, only visual or cognitive functions. The remaining 16 are undetermined for lack of detail in the source.

Of the 96 trials measured in the field, 64 report an improvement, 17 a mixed effect, 14 no effect, and one remains undetermined. Read too quickly, this figure would say that two trainings out of three work, and three reasons rule out that reading. Positive trials are published more easily than the others. Of the 64 positives, 27 are not randomized, including 7 simple before-and-after comparisons. And the samples are small, ten badminton players in one trial, sixteen women soccer players in another.

Only 14 trials go as far as a match or competition outcome. Laby and Appelbaum (2021) pointed this out in their critical review: few studies link vision to competition statistics, and the field would need larger, preregistered, placebo-controlled trials.

Recent meta-analyses quantify the shrinkage. On anticipation and decision-making in team sports, Zhu et al. (2024) find an effect of 0.65 on performance in real play, against 1.51 in the laboratory. Across 27 randomized trials, Guo et al. (2025) estimate the effect of visual training at 0.85 on decision time and 0.49 on sport-specific performance. The effect exists, and it melts away as you get closer to the game.

Transfer trials: those that reach the field, those that stop at the task

Sixteen trials, kept because they measure a sports task or a test built for the sport. The first eight report transfer. In the next eight, the trained task often improves, without the sports outcome following.

Read the "Training" column from top to bottom. At the top, the bat facing a virtual ball, the gaze in the putt and the shot, images of real matches. At the bottom, visual functions trained outside the movement, spheres tracked on a screen, a visual task grafted onto an agility exercise. In the object tracking trials, the trained task improves clearly (ηp² = 0.70 in Fleddermann's volleyball players) without the sports outcome moving. Romeas and colleagues write that they fail to reproduce the earlier positive results they were seeking to confirm; one co-author is linked to the company that markets the tool.

Why some visual trainings transfer and others don't

Hadlow et al. (2018) propose a simple grid for classifying perceptual training: the targeted function, how closely the stimulus matches what the athlete sees in play, how closely the response matches what they do there. The stronger the two matches, the more plausible the transfer. Reread the table with this grid, and it sorts itself almost on its own.

Broadbent et al. (2015) arrived at the same place by another route. To transfer, a training must preserve the coupling between perception and action and strongly resemble the performance; transfer to the field was, for them, the priority of future research. In 12 developing expert cricket batters, video occlusion coupled with practice of the observed movement improved anticipation, and the trained group's batting average was higher than the control group's during the study, the authors calling for additional evidence (Brenton et al., 2019).

Renshaw et al. (2018) read the question through ecological dynamics: generic perceptual-cognitive training produces, at best, a general transfer, without the specificity the player needs. Fransen (2024), in an opinion article, draws up the balance: no evidence to date of a far transfer from general perceptual or cognitive training to sports performance, whether stroboscopic vision, neurofeedback or executive functions.

A measurement trap blurs the reading further. When the test resembles the exercise, the measured gain inflates. Guo et al. (2025) quantified it across 33 randomized trials and 1,048 participants. Trials where test and training resemble each other report, for visual attention, a standardized effect of 1.65 against 0.07 in the others; for reaction time, 2.66 against 0.50; for decision accuracy, 1.46 against 0.62. Wood and Abernethy had seen it as early as 1997 with their reading placebo group.

This distinction helps read any study: the useful resemblance links the exercise to the game, and the one that links the exercise only to the test manufactures effects. Pagé et al. (2019) give an illustration in basketball: after four sessions, on-screen video and virtual reality both improve decisions on the trained plays, and only virtual reality improves them on new plays. This is the logic of representative learning design: a training transfers all the better when it samples the situations of the game.

Soccer, tennis, basketball, goalkeepers: where the literature concentrates by sport

These counts cover all studies in the inventory that mention the sport, and a single trial can mention several. Each sport article then makes its own selection, sometimes widened to neighboring work, and announces its own total. Soccer dominates, with 300 studies and 70 trials, of which 25 were measured in the field: information gathering before reception, visual search, decision-making; the scanning article analyzes 46. Basketball follows with 117 studies and 28 trials, of which 16 were measured in the field, the highest proportion among team sports: vision in basketball analyzes 98. Handball counts 22 studies and 9 trials; vision in handball keeps the 10 studies conducted in handball itself, plus 10 transposable studies.

On the racket side, tennis brings together 88 studies and 21 trials, padel only 3. A pilot in 23 juniors reports a ranking gain there after a cognitive program in virtual reality and on a tablet (+0.5 against +0.02); the authors are linked to the company that markets the program (Anguera et al., 2025). Vision in tennis and padel analyzes 67 studies. Badminton (48 studies, 15 trials) accounts for 4 of the 36 stroboscopic trials; vision in badminton analyzes 44. Table tennis (42 studies, 5 trials) has its work on oculomotor function in table tennis, 52 in the article devoted to it; in 28 international table tennis players, ten minutes of warm-up with stroboscopic glasses added nothing to sport-specific reaction speed (Strainchamps et al., 2023). Still in table tennis, 57 participants, 29 of them trained in virtual reality against a virtual opponent, were assessed on a real table by an expert coach who didn't know their group: the trained group improves more (d = 1.08 and 1.10) (Michalski et al., 2019).

Golf (46 studies, 12 trials, of which 11 measured on the task) and shooting are the home ground of the quiet eye. Baseball (91 studies, 10 trials) carries Gray's trial. Goalkeepers form a separate subset, where shot anticipation dominates: the goalkeeper's gaze brings together 50 studies, from soccer to handball and hockey. Dance and skating (39 studies) and gymnastics and trampoline (34) have no training trial: gaze during rotations is described there, never trained, see gaze in rotations in gymnastics, dance and skating.

Officiating counts 66 studies and 6 trials. In 20 amateur Australian football umpires, eight weeks of video decision-making training built into interval training added nothing (Kittel et al., 2019): see the referee's gaze and the offside decision.

Links between studies

Some studies on the map replicate others, others contradict them, and one team goes back on its own result. The table follows these threads.

From one Hülsdünker trial to the other, from 10 top-level badminton players to 32 elite youth analyzed, the advantage in the field disappears while visuomotor reaction time improves (from 251 to 238 ms). In golf, Panchuk et al. (2014) modified the quiet eye duration across 30 putts, from -287 to +366 ms depending on the instruction or aid used, without changing success. In ice hockey, in 35 players aged 16 to 20, the initial object tracking score was associated with neither draft rank nor game statistics (Tétreault et al., 2024). In 48 university hockey and volleyball athletes, it was correlated with no season measure, except penalty minutes (r = -0.40) (Acquin et al., 2025).

The blank areas of the map, and a verifiable bet

What the literature establishes, in the sense of several concordant meta-analyses: experts read their sport's cues better and anticipate better, without this advantage carrying over from one sport to another; the trained task almost always improves; the effect shrinks as the outcome gets closer to the match.

What remains debated: the transfer of the quiet eye to competition, positive in trials of 20 to 22 athletes; that of virtual reality, whose prediction interval touches zero; the differences in visual search in team sports, fragile after correction for publication bias.

The extrapolation concerns the idea that a general visual program or on-screen cognitive training improves play. Placebo-controlled trials don't show it, and Fransen finds no evidence of far transfer.

The blanks can be counted: no trial trains smooth pursuit. A single trial on saccades measures a sports task. Dance, skating and gymnastics have no trial. Only 14 trials measure the match, and the inventory's rating places only 3 studies out of 1,191 at the strong level of evidence.

Our bet, worded so that it can be disproved. In the next preregistered trials that measure a match outcome, trainings whose stimulus and response are those of the sport (sport video with motor response, virtual reality with the movement, quiet eye within the task) will produce larger effects than generic on-screen trainings. A preregistered, placebo-controlled trial of about a hundred players, in which generic training transferred to the match at least as much as training coupled to the sport, would be enough to refute it.

Visual training in sport in six sourced answers

How many scientific studies deal with athletes' visual training?

Our November 3, 2026 inventory catalogues 1,275 studies on athletes' vision, of which 1,191 excluding concussion. Among them, 229 are training trials, of which 109 randomized. The scoping review by Lochhead et al. (2024), with a narrower scope, counted 98 training studies out of 547 empirical studies published from 1976 to 2023.

Does visual training improve match performance?

Sometimes, and it is rarely measured: 14 trials out of 229 use a match or competition outcome. The clearest results concern the quiet eye in golf (1.9 fewer putts per round over ten competition rounds) and in shooting, batting in virtual reality in baseball, and corner kick anticipation in professional women soccer players. In team sports, a meta-analysis finds a weaker effect in real play than in the laboratory (0.65 against 1.51, Zhu et al., 2024).

Does on-screen multiple object tracking training transfer to the field?

The trials that tested it in soccer and volleyball don't show it. The task improves clearly, decision-making and in-game performance stay stable (Harenberg 2022, Fleddermann 2019, Romeas 2025). The critical review by Vater et al. (2021) finds only three far-transfer studies on ecological tasks, two of them without effect.

Do general sports vision programs do better than a placebo?

The three placebo-controlled trials of general programs cited here answer no. In 1997 and in 2001, Wood and Abernethy find no gain beyond familiarity with the tests. In 2021, in 32 university baseball and softball players followed double-blind, Shekar et al. find no difference from placebo.

Which visual skill transfers most often when measured in the field?

The quiet eye: 14 trials measured on the sports task, of which 12 positive, the best ratio among the categories with at least ten field trials, and a meta-analysis that puts the effect of training on performance at d = 0.84. The caveat lies in the small samples, and in the fact that changing the gaze is not enough: in one putting trial, the quiet eye changed without success changing.

Does visual training replace an eye exam?

No. A visual problem goes first to an ophthalmologist, then to an orthoptist in France, or an optometrist in Switzerland or the United States. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is added as a complement to a care pathway, never in its place.

Double vision, blurring, headaches: the ophthalmologist comes first

If your athlete reports double vision, persistent blurring, headaches during effort or dizziness, visual training waits. They see an ophthalmologist first, then an orthoptist in France, or an optometrist in Switzerland or the United States. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is added as a complement to a care pathway, never in its place.

Seeing to act: vision put back in the sensorimotor loop

Reread the whole map, and one pattern comes back. The trials that reach the field keep together what the athlete sees and what they do: the bat facing the ball, the putt under the gaze, the corner read then played. Those that stop at the task have separated the two, a screen on one side, the movement on the other.

The eyes are an entry door. What LabO RNP teaches is the whole sensorimotor loop: how what the athlete perceives organizes what they do. Vision holds a large place in it, alongside the vestibular system and proprioception, and it is the complete loop that plays out on the field.

The eye almost always improves on the task it is given; the game improves mostly when that task already resembled the game.

👉 I want to connect what my athlete sees to what they do.

Counting method

The consolidated inventory of November 3, 2026 brings together four passes: a first wave of 509 studies drawn from our reading sheets, 138 studies added from other sheets, 299 from a PubMed search on racket sports, individual ball sports and precision sports (from tennis to golf, shooting, cricket and combat sports), and 329 from a second search on team sports, officiating and a few cross-cutting topics (stroboscopic training, object tracking, virtual reality). 1,186 studies have a PMID; 89 do not, of which 80 are identified by their DOI alone and 9 have no identifier at all. The 56 studies cited on this page were checked one by one against their PubMed record (author, year, title), and the figures attributed to a study come from its abstract; the inventory counts come from the file.

Each row of the file carries a type (observational, intervention, review, other), a main category, one or more sports and themes, the final outcome and the result (improvement, mixed effect, no effect). These fields were filled in by readers following a common grid, from the reading sheets for the first wave (trials reread by hand, observational studies and reviews classified automatically from the sheet fields) and from PubMed abstracts for the supplements (from the sheet when the abstract was missing), then checked by script. The classification of the final outcome is then done by script on that field. A trial counts as "measured in the field" when its final outcome is a real task from the sport: field test, small-sided game, statistics or competition. As a precaution, any outcome that goes through video or the laboratory is counted as off-field, even when the video films official fights (one trial in combat sports). Reactive agility tests form a separate category. A single trial can mention several sports and themes, and those columns overlap. The coding remains approximate at the margins: a few virtual reality trials, or ones whose training is not primarily visual, appear among the trials with a match outcome because that outcome is a sports one. The 84 concussion studies are excluded from all counts on the map. The working file is not published.

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By the LabO RNP team