JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Adolescent athletes frequently sustain injuries while playing sports. Training visual processing skills, a domain implicated in sport performance and injury risk, could reduce injuries among youth athletes. The Useful Field of View (UFOV) cognitive training program improves visual processing efficiency. While UFOV training has been extensively studied in aging populations and yields significant cognitive and functional benefits, it has yet to be examined in adolescents.

Objective:

To conduct a preliminary assessment of the feasibility, acceptability, and mechanistic efficacy of UFOV training in youth.

Methods:

Six healthy adolescent athletes (ages 14-18 years) completed a 5-week adaptive, online UFOV training program from home. Two participants had a history of concussion (>1 year after clinical recovery). The UFOV training program has a game-like interface and increases in difficulty as participants accurately identify and locate targets rapidly displayed in the center and periphery of their screen amid distractors. Participants were assigned a total training dose of 250 levels across five weeks, with five, scheduled, ~25-minute sessions per week (equating to approximately 10.42 hours of assigned training time). We examined feasibility by calculating overall dose adherence (percent of assigned levels completed) and regimen adherence (percent of scheduled training sessions completed). Average overall acceptability, program usability, adoptability, and perceived benefit were calculated using responses to a post-training survey, where item-level responses ranged from 1 to 7 on a Likert scale (responses greater than 4 reflecting a more positive than neutral view toward the program). We administered the Double Decision Assessment pre- and post-training to quantify magnitude of change in visual processing efficiency.

Results:

In this pilot cohort, we observed strong dose (95.33%) and regimen (90.67%) adherence. Participants’ responses to the acceptability survey suggested positive views of the program overall (M=5.47, SD=0.40) and in terms of usability (M=5.69, SD= 0.43), perceived benefit (M=5.36, SD= 0.69) and adoptability (M=5.17, SD=0.61). All participants demonstrated improved visual processing efficiency from pre-to-post training (mean difference=168.67 milliseconds, SD=112.05, Cohen’s d= 1.51, large effect). The two participants with history of concussion exhibited the most improvement from pre-to-post training (mean difference= 306.50 milliseconds, SD=43.13).

Conclusions:

Though preliminary, results suggest that UFOV training is feasible and acceptable in adolescent athletes. Notably, all participants demonstrated improvements in visual processing efficiency after completing 5 weeks of training. Further research is needed to evaluate the extent to which UFOV training improves visual processing more than an active control intervention, and whether visual processing improvements transfer to untrained skills to enhance sport performance or reduce the risk of sport-related collisions and other forms of injury. This training may be particularly impactful for youth athletes with a history of concussion who have an increased risk for sustaining repeated injuries after returning to sport.