The head tracks and gaze predicts: how the world's best batters hit a ball

David L Mann, Wayne Spratford, Bruce Abernethy, David L Mann, Wayne Spratford, Bruce Abernethy

Abstract

Hitters in fast ball-sports do not align their gaze with the ball throughout ball-flight; rather, they use predictive eye movement strategies that contribute towards their level of interceptive skill. Existing studies claim that (i) baseball and cricket batters cannot track the ball because it moves too quickly to be tracked by the eyes, and that consequently (ii) batters do not - and possibly cannot - watch the ball at the moment they hit it. However, to date no studies have examined the gaze of truly elite batters. We examined the eye and head movements of two of the world's best cricket batters and found both claims do not apply to these batters. Remarkably, the batters coupled the rotation of their head to the movement of the ball, ensuring the ball remained in a consistent direction relative to their head. To this end, the ball could be followed if the batters simply moved their head and kept their eyes still. Instead of doing so, we show the elite batters used distinctive eye movement strategies, usually relying on two predictive saccades to anticipate (i) the location of ball-bounce, and (ii) the location of bat-ball contact, ensuring they could direct their gaze towards the ball as they hit it. These specific head and eye movement strategies play important functional roles in contributing towards interceptive expertise.

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1. Experimental set-up and measurement of…
Figure 1. Experimental set-up and measurement of head, ball, and gaze angles.
Panel A shows the three individual angles, and Panel B shows the three relative angles used to measure the movement of the eyes and head relative to the ball, and the eyes relative to the head. Individual angles are subtended by direction of the ball (yellow), gaze (blue), and head (red) at the eye (in degrees) relative to the initial direction at ball-release (dotted line shows the case where all three angles coincide at ball-release). In all cases a negative angle refers to a downward direction. Panel B shows the experimental set-up; in this case showing a positive gaze-ball angle (gaze located ahead of ball); negative head-ball angle (direction of head lagging behind ball); and positive gaze-head angle (gaze is ahead of head direction).
Figure 2. Direction of gaze relative to…
Figure 2. Direction of gaze relative to the ball.
Panel A shows, for each combination of level of batting skill and location of ball-bounce, (i) the mean vertical gaze angle and ball angle (black lines with closed and open circles respectively), and (ii) for each time point, the proportion of trials where a saccadic eye movement was initiated (frequency of saccades; red columns). Panel B shows the mean vertical gaze-ball angle for each location of ball-bounce. Grey shaded areas represent SE across trials, broken vertical lines indicate the mean time of ball-bounce, and solid vertical lines indicate the mean time of bat-ball contact.
Figure 3. Mean head-ball and gaze-head angles.
Figure 3. Mean head-ball and gaze-head angles.
Comparison of (A) mean head-ball and (B) gaze-head angles for the elite and club-level batters. Gray shaded areas represent SE across trials.
Figure 4. Exemplar trials for each batsman.
Figure 4. Exemplar trials for each batsman.
Demonstration of gaze-ball, gaze-head, and head-ball angles in an exemplar trial for each location of ball-bounce for all four participants. Vertical arrows indicate predictive saccades. Broken vertical lines indicate the timing of ball bounce and solid vertical lines indicate the timing of bat-ball contact. Open circles highlight that an experimenter viewing Mobile Eye footage of the trial judged gaze to have coincided with the ball at the moment it was hit (see Method). Rectangular insets show the location (in x-y coordinates for each video frame) of the ball relative to the direction of the batter’s head (see Method).
Figure 5. Saccadic eye movements.
Figure 5. Saccadic eye movements.
Horizontal lines represent the time course of each trial for the two elite (E1 & E2) and two club-level (C1 & C2) batters, showing (i) the presence and timing of saccadic eye-movements, and (ii) whether gaze coincided with the ball at the moment of bat-ball contact. NS indicates that no saccade took place in that trial.

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