We’re all here for the same thing: success.
No matter your stake, position or tie to sports, the ultimate goal is success. You play to win. You coach to win. You field a team to win (even if you’re taking a longer route there). You support the team throughout, but you want to win. We’re all in it to win it, and when you introduce tech to the equation, the story doesn’t change. You’re simply seeking a better way to win.
In Ireland, Professor Aidan Moran and his team at University College Dublin are looking for that win as well, and whether you’re evaluating the potential for it, hoping to improve your chances to earn it, or learning from the way you got it… they believe – utilizing a mix of psychology and technology – they’ve found it.
Moran has been with the university’s School of Psychology for decades, earning his PhD in 1984 with a focus on cognitive psychology and it’s relationship to problem solving. He’s been obsessed with the mental operations that motivate physical reactions, culminated in a two-year sabbatical study titled, “Mental Practice, Eye-Movements and Cognition in Action”, held during 2008 and 2009. That work led to a variety of roles as a consultant with several of Ireland’s top professional sports teams and performers (including a stint as the Official Psychologist to the Irish Olympic Squad).
The premise is relatively simple: eye movement, an involuntary human action based solely on reaction, enjoys a direct relationship to cognitive thought (i.e. pure thought based on a mix of memory, knowledge and perception). Thus the ability to track eye movement is the ability to directly measure cognitive thought. By measuring the cognitive process of the successful – or, by studying the eye movements of those who win – we can potentially establish a baseline of eye movement indicators that can predict success, help us train for success, or find the disconnect from success.
Moran has proven his theories via the world of tennis, utilizing eye tracking technologies to distinguish the successful from the struggling.
“We use those eye trackers to look at the differences between expert sportspeople and beginners in order to find out what’s going on in their mind as they look at something. The eye tracker gives us a pattern of fixations that the eyes display,” according to Moran.
“But the psychology begins when we start analyzing those fixations to see the knowledge that lies behind them. Sport is played by the body but won mainly in the mind.”
While the work done by Moran and Company is currently focused on optimal (and thus limited) case study – focused primarily on athletes engaged in athletics that offer easy access to eye tracking (tennis and golf) – his team is already pondering expansion into other sports. It’s clear this particular integration of physical metric and psychological prediction should translate to a variety of competitions… but we are excited about avenues these applications might open with the help of additional tech.
Consider FreeD, the latest video recording system utilized by the NFL to create 360-degree views of instant replay scenarios. This technology – capable of the most intimate video coverage we’ve seen in sports – opens a new era not only of event documentation for review, but also (potentially) a new era of player evaluation and training in a number sports played on an expansive field (rather than the comforts of a restricted play area, like tennis).
Take it one step further specifically for the NFL via Google Glass, where helmets can keep even the FreeD tech away from the eyes, and we can see the technology evolving towards Moran and his process of evaluation.
We’re all excited about the future integrations of sports and technology. It’s probably fair to suggest it’s a big reason why you’re reading this now, and it’s most certainly fair to note it as a big reason why we’re offering it to read. However, the work done by Moran and his team in Ireland represents true next-level progress, integrating sports psychology with sports technology. That may be the most innovative – and exciting – promise we’ve seen to date.