Baseball

Baseball is often acknowledged as one of the most difficult sports to excel at, as it requires high-level competencies relating to vision and hand-eye coordination as well as athletic skills like running and throwing valued in many sports. Preliminary studies suggest that baseball is an untapped field with promising potential payoffs when it comes to optimizing player potential using advanced assessment and training tools. For example, the University of California Riverside college baseball team recently experienced dramatically positive results after implementing a perceptual learning program. A peer-reviewed study titled “Improved vision and on-field performance in baseball through perceptual learning” and published in Cell Biology described how players benefitted from practicing computer-based techniques meant to rewire how the brain handles visual-spatial information. Improvements in player performance, in stats ranging from fewer strikeouts to increased slugging percentage, led to an increase in team wins estimated at four to five games over the 54-game season. The potential for similar improvements is vast when combining the MVR Awareness, Vision, and Drive tools along with advanced analytics.

Football

The National Football League has long recognized the potential benefits from a cognitive evaluation of prospective players, though its widely used test (the Wonderlic) is woefully ill-suited for assessing what really matters on the gridiron. Football smarts and the ability to read the field don’t show up in a verbal-linguistic test that asks for word definitions. What MVR has demonstrated is that such mental variables as skill in analyzing novel visual problems, identifying visual patterns and relationships that underpin these problems, and anticipating the occurrence of visual and spatial events can be evaluated and do in fact yield invaluable data directly tied to football performance. In a recent study MVR was able to collaborate with a college football program. Using a unique and advanced evaluation tool that is both scientific and interactive, MVR assessed player attributes relating to personality, motivation, and cognitive skills. A crucial finding was that visual-spatial intelligence is significantly higher for college players who scored during the season. In other words, MVR can generate hard data that gauges an athlete’s visual spatial intelligence and their personality type to accurately project their future football success. MVR is now able to leverage its expertise in sports psychology, data analytics, and artificial intelligence systems to help football organizations at all levels evaluate the desirable physical and mental qualities athletes should have in order to attain excellence and remain successful at the elite level.

Soccer

To a fan watching from high above a soccer pitch the game may at times seem to unfold like a chess match, with strategic moves of massed forces and exploitation of openings or undefended territory. Not surprisingly, the best soccer players are aware of this highly visual-spatial aspect of the game and are able to draw upon their own sophisticated perceptual and cognitive skills to control the game. Preliminary studies have shown that these skills include not only a facility for “seeing the whole field” but also an ability to anticipate both teammates’ and opponents’ moves by observations of their bodily kinematics. For example, a recent study published in the Journal of Vision found that soccer players were especially proficient at processing complex crowd scenes. Researchers have begun to show that spatial reasoning, attention, and executive function assessments can provide insights into soccer potential, as well as that training in perceptual cognitive skills can boost soccer performance. MVR’s unique psychological assessments and proprietary predictive models of performance can be invaluable tools for both evaluating and amplifying soccer ability.