Perceptual-cognitive adaptation under intermittent visual-information constraints: A scoping review of stroboscopic visual training for motor skill and functional performance

Intermittent reductions in visual information offer a way to examine how perceptual-cognitive and sensorimotor systems adapt during goal-directed movement. Stroboscopic visual training (SVT) is used across sport, exercise, and rehabilitation settings, but evidence spans heterogeneous populations, tasks, outcomes, and proposed mechanisms. This scoping review examined SVT as an intermittent visual-information constraint and mapped its application to motor skill and functional performance. PubMed, Embase, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and SPORTDiscus were searched from inception to 11 April 2026, identifying 61 studies involving 2217 participants. Studies involved athletes, healthy or physically active participants, sports medicine and rehabilitation populations, neurological groups, older adults, and other movement-relevant samples. SVT was usually delivered through stroboscopic glasses during sport-specific drills, visuomotor tasks, balance/proprioceptive or neuromuscular exercises, gait tasks, and postural-control paradigms. Outcomes included sport-specific skills, visual attention, motion perception, anticipation, visuomotor reaction, postural control, balance, force accuracy, gait, landing control, and rehabilitation-related function. Evidence mapping showed that applied outcomes were more frequently examined than mechanism-sensitive pathways, with some studies contributing to multiple categories: 55 addressed applied outcomes, 22 proximal functional changes, and 15 candidate mechanisms. Proposed mechanisms included altered visual sampling, attentional allocation, predictive control, sensory reweighting, reduced visual dependence, and neurocognitive processing, but these were often inferred from behavioral outcomes rather than directly tested. Evidence does not support treating SVT as a uniform performance-enhancement intervention with predictable cross-task and cross-population effects. SVT is better framed as a task-embedded visual-information constraint for studying perceptual-cognitive and sensorimotor adaptation in motor skill and functional performance contexts.