Feasibility and Acceptability of Useful Field of View Cognitive Training in Adolescent Athletes: Pilot Pre-Post Study

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.

The aim of this study is to preliminarily assess the feasibility and acceptability of UFOV training in youth and report on the magnitude of change in visual processing efficiency from pre- to posttraining.

Six adolescent athletes (aged 14-18 years) completed a 5-week adaptive, online, remote UFOV training program. The UFOV training program has a gamelike interface and increases in difficulty as participants accurately identify and locate targets that are rapidly displayed in the center and at the periphery of their screen amid distractors. Participants were assigned a total training dose of 250 levels across 5 weeks, with 5 scheduled sessions per week, each lasting approximately 25 minutes (equating to approximately 10.42 hours of assigned training time). Individuals met remotely with research staff weekly to receive coaching. We examined feasibility by calculating overall dose adherence (percentage of assigned levels completed) and regimen adherence (percentage of scheduled training sessions completed). Average overall acceptability, program usability, adoptability, and perceived benefit were calculated using responses to a posttraining survey, where item-level responses ranged from 1 to 7 on a Likert scale (responses greater than 4 reflected a view more positive than neutral toward the program). Participants completed the Double Decision Assessment pre- and posttraining to quantify the magnitude of change in visual processing efficiency.

In this pilot cohort, we observed strong dose (mean 95.33%, SD 11.43%) and regimen (mean 90.67%, SD 12.56%) adherence. Participants' responses to the acceptability survey suggested positive views of the program overall (mean 5.47, SD 0.4) and in terms of usability (mean 5.69, SD 0.43), perceived benefit (mean 5.36, SD 0.69), and adoptability (mean 5.17, SD 0.61). All participants demonstrated improved visual processing efficiency from pre- to posttraining (mean difference of 168.67, SD 112.05 ms; Cohen d=1.51).

Though preliminary, results suggest that UFOV training may be feasible and acceptable for adolescent athletes. All participants in this pilot study demonstrated improvements in visual processing efficiency after completing 5 weeks of training. Further research is needed to investigate the feasibility of implementing this training in other contexts, such as without research team support or in a group setting. Future work should also 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 reduce the risk of sport-related injury.