Perception in Sport: Volleyball

Volleyball players and nonplayers were compared for speed and accuracy of performance in a task involving detecting the presence of a volleyball in a rapidly presented slide of a volleyball situation. The volleyball situations depicted both game action and nongame events, for example, timeouts and warm-ups. Players and nonplayers did not differ in accuracy of response, but players were much faster in responding for both game and nongame slides. Further experiments showed that volleyball players' speed of response in ball detection was not a function of a simple athlete-nonathlete difference, nor of volleyball players' being fast at visual search in a nonvolleyball environment. The perceptual skill shown by volleyball players in this series of experiments is best described as a rapid visual search specific to the ball as target.