Alex Meadowcroft and James W. Roberts
Liverpool John Moores University, Research Institute of Sport & Exercise Sciences (RISES), Brain & Behaviour Research Group, Tom Reilly Building, Byrom Street, Liverpool, UK, L3 5AF
Citation
Meadowcroft, A., Roberts, J.W. (2026). The influence of visual blur on the return-of-serve within tennis: evidence for separable performance effects. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 57(3), 201-214. doi:10.7352/IJSP.2026.57.201
Abstract
The temporal demands of dynamic sports such as tennis, dictate the use of advance cues to anticipate and respond in time. It is a feature that often discriminates skilled athletes courtesy of their domain-specific perceptual-cognitive skills. Recent studies in this area have explored the influence of, and training under, visual blur. The present study aimed to elaborate on this using a more coupled setting. Skilled tennis players attempted a return-of-serve, while wearing lenses with Bangerter foils to induce different levels of blur. While the accuracy of anticipated direction remained relatively unaffected by the blur, the time it took to respond and elements of the return shot were adversely affected. These findings indicate separable effects of blur with a limited influence on key advance cues courtesy of the functionally specialised processing of ‘vision-for-action’. However, the decline in preparation and execution was likely due to related uncertainty and high-precision eye-hand coordination, respectively.
Keywords: Visual acuity; Bangerter; low spatial frequency; dorsal pathway; si- mulated low vision