Elite athletes don’t have better basic eyesight than amateurs, but superior dynamic visual-motor skills

PRAGUE, ČESKá REPUBLIKA, CZECH REPUBLIC, October 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Professionals judge depth, react faster and track moving objects better than lower-level athletes, yet do no better on the eye chart, a Second Faculty of Medicine of Charles University study of 598 athletes finds

Top athletes do not have sharper eyesight than athletes who compete at lower levels. Their advantage lies in visual skills that have to work at speed. A study of 598 athletes, led by researchers at the Second Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague, found that professionals outperformed non-professionals on six of ten visual-motor measures, including depth perception, reaction time and tracking several moving objects at once. On visual clarity and contrast sensitivity, the two groups did not differ.

The study, published in the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine, compared 499 athletes competing at national or international level with 99 recreational, school and college athletes. All of them were between 14 and 39 years old.

“When it comes to basic eye tests like visual acuity and contrast sensitivity, the professionals look much like other athletes,” said first author Viktor Veselý of the Department of Rehabilitation and Sports Medicine at the Second Faculty of Medicine and Motol University Hospital. “They pull ahead in tasks where the eyes and the brain have to work together quickly: shifting focus between near and distant objects, taking in a lot of information in a split second, and keeping track of several moving targets.”

Two kinds of tests

The researchers analysed anonymised records from routine examinations at a sports vision and optometry centre. Each athlete had been tested with conventional optometric methods and on the Senaptec Sensory Tablet, a touchscreen device that measures seven visual-motor abilities. Earlier large studies relied on digital tests alone. This one used both in the same athletes, ten measures in total.

The combination of clinical and digital assessments also allowed the researchers to examine how different visual abilities relate to one another. Multiple-object tracking was closely associated with perception span, while binocular accommodation and vergence facility were also linked. These findings suggest that some visual skills may be better understood as parts of a broader performance profile rather than as isolated test results.

Professionals scored higher on depth perception, reaction time, multiple object tracking and perception span, which reflects how much a person registers from a brief flash of information. They were also quicker at switching between near and distant visual targets, both on the tablet and in the conventional optometric test. Two lens and prism tests of how the eyes converge and refocus showed small differences that did not hold up statistically.

The team also let a self-organising map, a type of neural network, sort the athletes by their visual results alone. Professionals and non-professionals ended up largely in different parts of the map.

“Visual acuity tells you whether an athlete needs glasses, and that matters,” said co-author Pavel Kolář, head of the department. “It tells you very little about the level they compete at. For profiling players, we would look at near-far quickness, multiple object tracking, perception span and reaction time. Those were the measures that separated the groups.”

Sport and sex

Athletes from strategic team sports such as football and basketball tracked multiple moving objects better than those from interceptive sports such as tennis or fencing. In team sports, players have to follow teammates, opponents and the ball at the same time.

Women scored higher on depth perception and on how quickly the eyes adjust focus. Men did better on contrast sensitivity and multiple object tracking. Women in the sample were more often in interceptive sports, so the authors caution that part of these differences may come from the mix of sports rather than from biology.

Training or selection

Because the study looks at athletes at a single point in time, it cannot say whether years of sport build these skills or whether people who have them are more likely to reach the top. According to the examining optometrists, none of the athletes had done structured vision training. The researchers did not, however, have standardised data on how much each athlete trained.

“Our results fit the idea that sport-specific practice develops these skills, but selection probably plays a part too, and this design can’t tell the two apart,” Veselý said. “Next we want to follow athletes over time, record how much they train, and see how their test results relate to how they actually perform in competition.”

Tomáš Gavlas
Second Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague

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