Split second decision making in sport

The article In the blink of an eye looks at the decision required in the high speed sports like cricket, baseball and tennis.

So what sets such batsmen apart? It is tempting to assume that they simply have better visual reaction times than the rest of us and can pick the ball up quicker. But according to “Wait”, a new book by Frank Partnoy, that is not the case. The book is about general decision-making in life, but contains a chapter on “super-fast sports”. It concludes that the best batsmen are no faster at “seeing” than their less successful colleagues, or even many amateurs. Whether you are Virender Sehwag or a village-green clubber, it will take you around 200 milliseconds to react to the ball. The best batsmen are set apart by what happens in the next 200 milliseconds, which the book calls the preparation stage. This means deciding on the shot, moving into the correct position and swinging the bat. (The third stage, hitting the ball, accounts for the last 100 milliseconds.) And here the margin between us and them is miniscule: “A cricket batsman who is just fifty milliseconds slower than an average professional—in other words, someone who is slower by just a fraction of the time it takes to blink—simply has no chance of competing with the pros.” Quoting Peter McLeod, an Oxford professor, the book goes on: “Their skill, it seems, lies in how they use the information to control motor actions once they have picked it up, not in the more elementary process of picking it up.”