General Visual Ability as a Moderator in the Relationship RAN –Fluency in a Regular Orthography

Visual skills play a controversial role in the literacy process. The predictive part of RAN on fluency is known, especially in transparent spelling. In this research, we wanted to explore the influence of visual abilities on literacy for primary school students; for this purpose, we evaluated 209 students. We tested both the Reading and decoding efficiency, rapid naming, and visual abilities. The interaction of rapid naming (RAN) and visual ability (VA) significantly determined fluency. This association is discussed concerning other findings that have demonstrated the visuospatial abilities influence literacy.

Stereopsis in Sports: Visual Skills and Visuomotor Integration Models in Professional and Non-Professional Athletes

Visual skills in sport are considered relevant variables of athletic performance. However, data on the specific contribution of stereopsis—as the ability to perceive depth—in sport performance are still scarce and scattered in the literature. The aim of this review is therefore to take stock of the effects of stereopsis on the athletic performance, also looking at the training tools to improve visual abilities and potential differences in the visuomotor integration processes of professional and non-professional athletes. Dynamic stereopsis is mainly involved in catching or interceptive actions of ball sports, whereas strategic sports use different visual skills (peripheral and spatial vision) due to the sport-specific requirements. As expected, professional athletes show better visual skills as compared to non-professionals. However, both non-professional and professional athletes should train their visual skills by using sensory stations and light boards systems. Non-professional athletes use the visual inputs as the main method for programming motor gestures. In contrast, professional athletes integrate visual information with sport expertise, thus, they encode the match (or the athletic performance) through a more complex visuomotor integration system. Although studies on visual skills and stereopsis in sports still appear to be in their early stages, they show a large potential for both scientific knowledge and technical development.

Vision Evaluation Tools for Adults With Acquired Brain Injury: A Scoping Review

Background. Unrecognized visual deficits (VDs) following an acquired brain injury (ABI) may impact clients’ rehabilitation. Little is known about evaluation tools used in vision rehabilitation. Purpose. To systematically explore the literature describing evaluation tools used for VD on adults with ABI. Method. Using a scoping review methodology, we searched in MEDLINE(Ovid), Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and the grey literature from inception to 2020. Quantitative and thematic analyses were performed. Findings. Of the 83 studies reporting on 86 evaluation tools, 47% used multiple tools to assess VD. Tools were mostly used by occupational therapists and psychologists to evaluate intermediate, intermediate to high, and high-level visual skills. Clinicians tend to select specific tools that focus on different levels of the hierarchy of visual skills. Implications. Future research should investigate the optimal timeframe for assessment of VD and the psychometric properties of tools to ensure comprehensive VD evaluation.

Vision in Futsal Players: Coordination and Reaction Time

Background: Coordination and reaction time are relevant aspects of a sport’s competitive performance within teams. The aim of this study was to explore if a group of futsal players, in a laboratory context, would present better results from actions where vision is prevalent compared to a control group without contact with futsal or any other sport. Methods: The digital system of the COI- SV software was used; six tests were selected, related to coordination (“Eye/hand coordination”; “Coordination and identification”) and reaction time (“Anticipation Time”; “Peripheral response”; “reaction time”; “Visual memory”). Results: Of all the tests performed, only in the anticipation time test did the futsal players obtain better results than the control group. The average time of the failures was lower in relation to the control group. In the others, no differences were found between the two groups. Conclusions: The futsal players did not perform better than the control group in most of the tests carried out, except in the “anticipation time”. Therefore, visual training maybe necessary to improve visual skills and sports performance.

Realism Relativized: A Cultural-Historical Approach to What Images Capture

It is sometimes assumed that there can be a unified and universal analysis of pictorial realism, but this seem implausible. Realism has been understood differently at different times in Western art history art, and art-making traditions elsewhere often aspire to forms of realism that contrast with forms operative in the West. Such variations are presented here, with examples from European, African, and East Asian art. Contact between cultural traditions is also considered. Within analytic aesthetics, some definitions of realism are designed to accommodate cultural diversity, but they face challenges. Leading definitions are critically examined. For example, there are theories that focus on entrenchment, visual skills, and informativeness. None of these constructs captures what realist systems share in common, and none provides an ideal framework for explicitly describing how such systems differ. An alternative theory of pictorial realism is presented. On that theory, realist systems each aim to capture aspects of reality, but they focus on different aspects and provide different manners by which those aspects may be captured.

Emergent Color Categorization in a Neural Network trained for Object Recognition

Color is a prime example of categorical perception, yet it is still unclear why and how color categories emerge. The key questions revolve around to what extent perceptual and linguistic processes shape categories. While prelinguistic infants and animals appear to treat color categorically, several recent attempts to model category formation have successfully utilized communicative concepts to predict color categories. Considering this apparent discrepancy, we take a different approach. Rather than modeling categories directly, we focus on the potential emergence of color categories as the result of acquiring basic visual skills. For this, we investigated whether color is represented categorically in a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained to recognize objects in natural images. We systematically trained novel output layers to the CNN for a color classification task, and found that clear borders arise between novel (non-training) colors that are largely invariant to the training colors. We confirmed these border locations by searching for the optimal border placement using an evolutionary algorithm that relies on the principle of categorical perception. Our findings also extend to stimuli with multiple, colored, words of varying color contrast, as well as colored objects with larger colored surfaces. These results provide strong evidence that color categorization can emerge with the development of object recognition.

The Role of Social Media in Sports Vision

Background: Sports vision is a relatively new specialty. The objective is to provide ophthalmological and optometric care services for the care of vision in the sports field. An increasing number of athletes and coaches are trying to improve visual skills and they seek information on social media. The current excess of information has made it increasingly difficult to identify high quality articles. For this reason, alternative metrics are useful tools to identify publications that draw attention to society. This research aims to study the influence of social networks on the importance of vision in sport. Methods: Altmetric Explorer was used to perform a search using “sport”, “vision” and “eye” as keywords. The 100 outcomes with the most attention were analyzed and correlated with the number of citations in the Web of Science (WoS) using the Spearman correlation coefficient. Results: The 100 best Altmetric Attention Scores (AASs) were published in 67 journals and had a mean AAS value of 30.22 ± 62.37 The results were discussed mainly on Twitter, with a mean of 113.99 ± 43.86 tweets and retweets and a mean of 75.92 ± 79.92 readers in Mendeley. There was no correlation between AAS and WoS Cites for the top 100 outcomes and the correlation was low if we considered the total research results rather than the top 100. Conclusions: The citations are not related to the impact of scientific articles on social networks. Sports vision is a specialty with a growing interest in social media.