II.Baseball prowess is intricately tied to the power of the eye. Familiar expressions, such as“keep your eye on the ball” and “you can’t hit what you can’t see”, clearly underscore theimportant role that vision plays in the sport. The act of hitting a pitched baseball is widelyregarded as among the most challenging activities in all of sports. In milliseconds, battersmust interpret sparse visual information, project the path of a ball that can be moving up to100 miles per hour, and execute a swing – or not. The pitcher’s task, while equally demanding,is quite different. Pitchers, by deception or ability, attempt to deny the batter effective contactwith the ball while projecting it through the strike zone 60 feet away. This iconic pitcher–hitter duel gets played out thousands of times over the life of a baseball player, withtremendous competitive, financial, and social consequences.
        Because of the high sensorimotor demands of the sport and the large amount ofperformance data available for analysis, baseball has been at the forefront of sports scienceresearch. Studies addressing sensorimotor skills have shown expert baseball players to havesuperior visual acuity, enhanced contrast sensitivity, and better visual tracking abilities thannon-athlete controls. Research has also indicated that good batters make greater use ofperipheral vision and implement more anticipatory saccades to put their eyes ahead of pitchesthat are moving at, or near, the limit of the vestibular-ocular system. These skills are honed toallow for optimal visual performance, responding to a visual stimulus in the shortest amountof time and based on the least amount of information.
          The important role of sensorimotor skills in baseball is further underscored by studiesthat have demonstrated correlations between visual skills and baseball performance. Forexample, in a sample of 213 professional baseball players in the Southern Baseball League,Classe et al. (1997) observed an association between visual reaction times and battingperformance, but not with fielding or pitching statistics. Similarly, higher batting averageshave been linked to rapid perceptual recognition using tachistoscopic tests, while higherbatting averages and lower strikeout percentages have also been linked to better visualconvergence, divergence, and tracking skills. Further, previous evidence has indicated thattraining regimen targeting visual skills can improve game performance among collegebaseball athletes.
        In the larger context of factors underlying athletic expertise, there has been an ongoingdebate as to whether elite athletes possess inherently better visual systems (so-called visualhardware), or whether these differences are restricted to enhanced perceptual and cognitiveabilities (so-called visual software). Findings such as those noted above demonstratingsuperior visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, and convergence/divergence in expert athletes offersupport towards the hardware account, while numerous other studies have demonstratedsuperior sports-specific software skills, such as better anticipation, pattern recognition, andvisual search, in the absence of hardware differences. Given these discrepant findings, thevaried samples and sample sizes, and the inherent challenges conducting studies withhigh-level athletes, there remains a pressing need for more research to arbitrate thesediverging accounts.
【題組】41. What is this passage about?
(A) An unresolved issue in sports science.
(B) An ordinary skill in professional baseball.
(C) An increasing demand for baseball players.
(D) An infamous duel between pitchers and batters.