Laterality and performance: Are golfers learning to play backwards?

When using a bimanual tool to strike an object, most people place their preferred hand closer to the striking end. In sports, a player is deemed to adopt a "right- or left-handed" stance depending on the hand that is lower on the club or bat. Research has suggested there is an advantage in going against this convention by placing the preferred hand at the top in a "reversed-stance". This study aimed to establish if the reversed-stance advantage exists in golf, whether it is underpinned by the preferred hand or dominant eye, and why players adopt such a stance. We tested hand preference, eye dominance, and full swing stance in 150 golfers (30 for each handicap category) and conducted follow-up interviews with 12 reversed-stance players. Professional or category 1 golfers were 21.5 times more likely to adopt a reversed-stance. The advantage could not be explained by ambidexterity or the dominant eye but could be explained by the position of the preferred hand. Reversed-stance players cited a variety of reasons for adopting it and were more likely to display a left-hand preference. Findings offer initial evidence of a reversed-stance advantage in golf and can inform work identifying its origins and mechanisms.

Habitual wearers of colored lenses adapt more rapidly to the color changes the lenses produce.

The visual system continuously adapts to the environment, allowing it to perform optimally in a changing visual world. One large change occurs every time one takes off or puts on a pair of spectacles. It would be advantageous for the visual system to learn to adapt particularly rapidly to such large, commonly occurring events, but whether it can do so remains unknown. Here, we tested whether people who routinely wear spectacles with colored lenses increase how rapidly they adapt to the color shifts their lenses produce. Adaptation to a global color shift causes the appearance of a test color to change. We measured changes in the color that appeared "unique yellow", that is neither reddish nor greenish, as subjects donned and removed their spectacles. Nine habitual wearers and nine age-matched control subjects judged the color of a small monochromatic test light presented with a large, uniform, whitish surround every 5s. Red lenses shifted unique yellow to more reddish colors (longer wavelengths), and greenish lenses shifted it to more greenish colors (shorter wavelengths), consistent with adaptation "normalizing" the appearance of the world. In controls, the time course of this adaptation contained a large, rapid component and a smaller gradual one, in agreement with prior results. Critically, in habitual wearers the rapid component was significantly larger, and the gradual component significantly smaller than in controls. The total amount of adaptation was also larger in habitual wearers than in controls. These data suggest strongly that the visual system adapts with increasing rapidity and strength as environments are encountered repeatedly over time. An additional unexpected finding was that baseline unique yellow shifted in a direction opposite to that produced by the habitually worn lenses. Overall, our results represent one of the first formal reports that adjusting to putting on or taking off spectacles becomes easier over time, and may have important implications for clinical management.