Inspection Time and High-Speed Ball Games

Abstract

It has been suggested that successful batsmen in cricket are not distinguished by their fast speed of visual information intake. A study is presented in which a season's batting averages for twenty regular cricketers, all members of the same local team, were correlated with the cricketers' visual inspection times. The correlation was −0.63 ( p < 0.005), suggesting that the successful batsmen were faster at picking up information from briefly presented visual displays. When the age factor was eliminated, the partial correlation between inspection time and batting average remained significant at −0.52 ( p < 0.01). This finding is discussed with respect to the sources of information available from a ball in flight.