The effect of eye movement sonification on visual search patterns and anticipation in novices

Visual information is essential to successfully anticipate the direction of the shot in ball sports whereas using another sense in motor learning has received less attention. The present study aimed to examine whether the multisensory learning with the orienting visual attention through the sound would influence anticipatory judgments with respect to the visual system alone. Forty novice students were randomly divided into visual and audio-visual groups. The experimental procedure comprised two phases; 1 training and 3 testing phases, respectively. During the training sessions, 200 video clips were employed to anticipate the direction of the shot, interspersed by 5-min of rest every 25 trials. A sound was used to orient the attention of the audio-visual group toward key pointsmeanwhile the visual group watched the videos without sounds. Then, during the testing phases, they watched 20 video clips in the pretest, immediate retention, and delay retention test. The film was occluded at the racket-ball contact and then they quickly and carefully decided the direction of the shot. The audio-visual group showed higher response accuracy and shorter decision time than the visual group in the immediate and delayed retention. The audio visual group exhibited longer fixation duration to the key areas than the visual group. In conclusion, using multisensory learning may not only reallocate perceptual and cognitive workload but also could reduce distraction, since, unlike visual perception, auditory perception requires neither specific athlete orientation nor a focus of attention. In general, the use of the multisensory learning is likely to be effective in learning complex motor tasks, facilitating the discovery of the new task needs and helping to perceive the exercise structure.