The role and impact of vision and vision training on sport performance: a systematic review

In sport, athletes who are confronted with complex and rapidly changing environments are often required to make critical decisions in high-pressure and time-constrained scenarios. To effectively address these constraints, athletes rely on a range of perceptual-cognitive skills. These skills include the ability to recognize visual information in advance, identify play patterns /structures, and an awareness of what might happen. Scientific studies show that humans use on average 40% to 60% of their visual abilities; therefore, through targeted training it is possible to achieve a significant improvement in sports performance. A method that allows to improve the visual abilities of athletes of all sports disciplines, and in particular in those in which the speed of the ball plays a central role, is Sport Vision Training. Recently, thanks to new technological discoveries, it was found that it is possible to perform vision training also thanks to virtual reality. The purpose of this study is to show the potential of the use of Sport Vision Training by deepening the scientific evidence existing in the literature. The retrieval of scientific literature took place using specialized web searches on: PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, PMC, CrossRef using the PRISMA method.