Athletes are better at peripheral colour detection.

Abstract

This study examined how background context and athletic experience influence peripheral colour detection. Twenty-six participants – outdoor athletes, indoor athletes and non-athletes – completed a colour detection task with human figure or circle stimuli on sport-specific indoor and outdoor scenes. Outdoor athletes showed superior detection across conditions. Crucially, this advantage was not restricted to sport-specific stimuli or backgrounds, suggesting that perceptual learning in athletes generalises across contexts. This quasi-experimental study compared naturally occurring sport groups rather than assigning participants to conditions, allowing investigation of experience-related differences in peripheral processing. The findings provide evidence that perceptual expertise in sport reflects more than reaction speed, highlighting improvements in low-level perception. They also demonstrate that visual plasticity persists beyond critical developmental periods: repeated exposure to complex, unpredictable outdoor environments appears sufficient to shape perceptual abilities later in life.