Effect of Short-Term Badminton Training on Global Motion Perception in Adults

Objective To investigate the effect of short-term badminton training on global motion perception (GMP) in adults.

Methods 21 participants in the training group were all members of the badminton training class, and 20 participants in the control group were ordinary undergraduates. The training group received 10 weeks of badminton training, and the control group did not carry out any regular physical training. Both groups completed the landing point perception task of a flying shuttle and the GMP task.

Results The training group showed a significantly higher accuracy in the landing point judgement task and a lower threshold value in the GMP task than those before the training; while the control group did not exhibit similar changes.

Conclusion The short-term badminton training may improve not only adults' performance in training-related visual motion perception tasks, but their performance in more general and training-independent tasks (e.g., GMP task). The visual motion perception experience accumulated by badminton training may be better in terms of transferability.