Florian Loffing

On the advantage of being left-handed in volleyball: further evidence of the specificity of skilled visual perception.

High ball speeds and close distances between competitors require athletes in interactive sports to correctly anticipate an opponent’s intentions in order to render appropriate reactions. Although it is considered crucial for successful performance, such skill appears impaired when athletes are confronted with a left-handed opponent, possibly because of athletes’ reduced perceptual familiarity with rarely encountered left-handed actions. To test this negative perceptual frequency effect hypothesis, we invited 18 skilled and 18 novice volleyball players to predict shot directions of left- and right-handed attacks in a video-based visual anticipation task. In accordance with our predictions, and with recent reports on laterality differences in visual perception, the outcome of left-handed actions was significantly less accurately predicted than the outcome of right-handed attacks. In addition, this left–right bias was most distinct when predictions had to be based on preimpact (i.e., before hand–ball contact) kinematic cues, and skilled players were generally more affected by the opponents’ handedness than were novices. The study’s findings corroborate the assumption that skilled visual perception is attuned to more frequently encountered actions.

Left-Handedness in Professional and Amateur Tennis

Negative frequency-dependent effects rather than innate predispositions may provide left-handers with an advantage in one-on-one fighting situations. Support mainly comes from cross-sectional studies which found significantly enhanced left-hander frequencies among elite athletes exclusively in interactive sports such as baseball, cricket, fencing and tennis. Since professional athletes’ training regimes continuously improve, however, an important unsolved question is whether the left-handers’ advantage in individual sports like tennis persists over time. To this end, we longitudinally tracked left-hander frequencies in year-end world rankings (men: 1973–2011, ladies: 1975–2011) and at Grand Slam tournaments (1968–2011) in male and female tennis professionals. Here we show that the positive impact of left-handed performance on high achievement in elite tennis was moderate and decreased in male professionals over time and was almost absent in female professionals. For both sexes, left-hander frequencies among year-end top 10 players linearly decreased over the period considered. Moreover, left-handedness was, however, no longer seems associated with higher probability of attaining high year-end world ranking position in male professionals. In contrast, cross-sectional data on left-hander frequencies in male and female amateur players suggest that a left-handers’ advantage may still occur on lower performance levels. Collectively, our data is in accordance with the frequency-dependent hypothesis since reduced experience with left-handers in tennis is likely to be compensated by players’ professionalism.

Relative Age Effects Are a Developmental Problem in Tennis: But Not Necessarily when You're Left-Handed!.

Relative Age Effects (RAEs), describing attainment inequalities as a result of interactions between biological age and age‐grouping procedures, have been demonstrated across many sports contexts. This study examined whether an additional individual characteristic (i.e., handedness) mediated RAEs in tennis. Relative age and handedness distributions of 1027 male professional tennis players ranked in the year‐end ATP Top 500 for 2000–2006 were analyzed. Relatively older players, born in the first two quartiles, were over‐represented for right‐handed players (86.56%), whereas no RAEs were found for left‐handers (13.44%). Findings seem to suggest that left‐handers in tennis gain advantages that circumvent the RAE problem.

The Serve in Professional Men’s Tennis: Effects of Players’ Handedness

The serve is one of the most important strokes in tennis and has often been the subject of sport scientific investigation. Left-handed players are said to have an advantage in tennis, especially when serving against a right-handed player to the advantage court. We investigated the serving strategies of male left- and righthanded professional tennis players whose serves (N= 4744) were recorded by the automated ball tracking Hawk-Eye system at international tournaments. Right- and left-handed serves differed significantly regarding the ball distribution in the opponent’s service box at both first and second serves as well as regarding the angle of lateral ball flight. As a consequence, players have to take into account different probabilities regarding the direction of serve when awaiting right- vs. lefthanded serves. At the same time, they also need to adjust their return stroke due to the different spin imposed on balls served right- vs. left-handed. Furthermore, analyses also revealed that the left-handers’ serve is not simply mirrored to that of right-handers but still significantly different. In light of the reduced familiarity with the left-hander’s style of play, the findings suggest that for the serve in tennis tactical and technical aspects may promote the left-handers’ advantage.

Anticipation in sport

Anticipation has become an increasingly important research area within sport psychology since its infancy in the late 1970s. Early work has increased our fundamental understanding of skilled anticipation in sports and how this skill is developed. With increasing theoretical and practical insights and concurrent technological advancements, researchers are now able to tackle more detailed questions with sophisticated methods. Despite this welcomed progress, some fundamental questions and challenges remain to be addressed, including the (relative) contributions of visual and motor experience to anticipation, intraindividual and interindividual variation in gaze behaviour, and the impact of non-kinematic (contextual or situational) information on performance and its interaction with advanced kinematic cues during the planning and execution of (re)actions in sport. The aim of this opinion paper is to shortly sketch the state of the art, and then to discuss recent work that has started to systematically address open challenges thereby inspiring promising future routes for research on anticipation and its application in practice.

Left-handedness and time pressure in elite interactive ball games

According to the fighting hypothesis, frequency-dependent selection gives relatively rarer left-handers a competitive edge in duel-like contests and is suggested as one mechanism that ensured the stable maintenance of handedness polymorphism in humans. Overrepresentation of left-handers exclusively in interactive sports seems to support the hypothesis. Here, by referring to data on interactive ball sports, I propose that a left-handers advantage is linked to the sports’ underlying time pressure. The prevalence of left-handers listed in elite rankings increased from low (8.7%) to high (30.39%) time pressure sports and a distinct left-hander overrepresentation was only found in the latter (i.e. baseball, cricket and table tennis). This indicates that relative rarity and the interactive nature of a contest are not sufficient per se to evoke a left-hander advantage. Refining the fighting hypothesis is suggested to facilitate prediction and experimental verification of when and why negative frequency-dependent selection may benefit left-handedness.

Laterality in Sports: More Than Two Sides of the Same Coin

So, in the muscular exercises of tennis, racket, and fives, a man with an inert left hand would not score well in the game. Unless Esmeralda or La Sylphide could pirouette on the left tiptoe as well as on the right, she would be found wanting. Unless those really hard-working men who imperil their lives, day after day, in performing feats of rope dancing, rope swinging, trapeze performances, aerial leaping, globe climbing, and the like—unless such men could use the left arm and leg as rapidly and as firmly as the right, their lives would not be worth many months’ purchase in the estimation of an insurance office actuary. And so the juggler, who tosses up his balls, cups, plates, and knives, does just as much work with the left hand as with the right. We therefore know that, whatever Nature did or did not intend, training will, to some extent, bring about equi-handedness and equal action in the two feet or legs.

Performance Differences Between Left- and Right-Sided Athletes in One-on-One Interactive Sports

Abstract Compared to the incidence in the normal population, left-sided athletes are considerably overrepresented in one-on-one interactive sports such as fencing, table tennis, or baseball. This suggests that left-sided athletes enjoy a performance advantage in these sports. Here we critically review evidence to explain this possible advantage by examining the prevalence of lateral preferences in sports, success in left- and right-sided athletes, and laterality effects in athletes’ task-specific perceptual-cognitive skills. We conclude that, according to our understanding and knowledge of the literature, the advantage does not result from facilitating processes or mechanisms associated with left-handedness per se, as suggested by the innate superiority hypothesis. Rather, an advantage may be primarily, but not exclusively, due to the combination of the demands of one-on-one interactive sports with the difficulty of finding optimal solutions against rarely encountered left-sided opponents (negative frequency dependence). Our review concludes with a critical discussion of limitations in methodologies and explanatory approaches. We further highlight exemplar future research directions.

Perceptual Expertise in Handball

In this chapter, we review and discuss the empirical evidence on perceptual expertise available from the handball literature so far that relates to the four groups of actors—goalkeepers, field players, coaches and referees. As will be clear from the following sections, considerable effort has been invested in examining and understanding goalkeepers’ perceptual-cognitive skills; however, comparatively less is known about these skills in the other three groups. In this regard, we hope this chapter encourages intensification of efforts in investigating perceptual-cognitive skills as one factor deemed relevant, among others, to different actors’ performances in handball.

Goofy vs. Regular: Laterality effects in surfing

ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to test if lateral preferences of surfers are associated with behaviour and performance depending on the direction of a breaking wave. We hypothesized that wave direction and surf stance interact in creating favourable or debilitative performance demands as surfers are either facing the wave (frontside) or the wave is breaking in the back of the surfers (backside). Study 1 was an online survey collecting self-report data of recreational surfers (n = 394). In Study 2, we analysed all wave scores (n = 2,552) and laterality of professional surfers during the season of 2014. Study 1 demonstrated that recreational surfers preferred surfing frontside and described themselves as more skilful when surfing frontside as this is facilitative for picking up visual information. Study 2 did not provide clear evidence that professional surfers on average scored higher during contests when surfing frontside, but when professional surfers had a choice of surfing frontside vs. backside, they were more likely to surf frontside. We discuss the diverging findings between Study 1 and Study 2 from the “circumvention-of-limits” argumentation within the expertise literature as professional surfers most likely have acquired skills allowing them to compensate for debilitative individual and environmental circumstances.