Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MSc)

Department

Kinesiology

Faculty/School

Faculty of Science

First Advisor

Michael Cinelli

Advisor Role

Supervisor

Abstract

Accurate visuomotor integration is a crucial component of successful navigation and is a skill that is enhanced with experience, such as athletic training. Athletes demonstrate a more extensive understanding of their action boundaries within the sport context, and an enhanced ability to detect key properties of the environment to inform optimal action strategies (i.e., attunement). However, following an injury, such as a sport-related concussion (SRC), impairments in visuomotor integration are present. Athletes who return to sport following an SRC are at a greater risk of sustaining a subsequent musculoskeletal injury than their non concussed teammates despite clearing the extensive return-to-sport protocol (RTS). It could be possible that visuomotor integration remains disrupted following athletes’ return to sport, thus contributing to the increased risk of musculoskeletal injury.

The objective of this thesis was two-fold: 1) create a visuomotor integration task that was reflective of the demands and complexity of the sporting environment; and 2) use the visuomotor integration task to determine whether visuomotor integration deficits persist in athletes who have recently sustained an SRC and completed the RTS protocol, and whether those deficits remain 30-days later. The task created assessed athletes’ ability to properly match the aperture width of a set of closing doors to their shoulder width when they passed through the doors. The difficulty of the task was increased with the simultaneous execution of a serial 3’s subtraction task (i.e., a cognitive-motor dual task (DT)) to simulate similar demands to the sporting environment.

Study 1 hypothesized that athletes would be able to maintain a high level of performance on the motor task even with the addition of a cognitive task due to their enhanced visuomotor integration capabilities. No differences were found in athletes’ visuomotor integration abilities (attunement) on the current task. It was concluded that the lack of task differences was due to athletes exhibiting differing responses on the visuomotor task to the introduction of the cognitive task. Additionally, athletes exhibited poor visuomotor attunement, likely to due to the task not targeting transferable sport specific skills as well as a lack of informed feedback regarding their performance.

Study 2 compared recently concussed athletes with non-concussed matched teammates. It was hypothesized that recently concussed athletes would exhibit deficits in visuomotor attunement on the task developed in Study 1 when completed following the RTS protocol and that the DT task would reveal that these deficits remain 30-days later. No differences were found between groups in visuomotor integration task, or cognitive task performance, likely due to large variability within groups and poor execution of the visuomotor attunement task. It cannot be concluded that athletes do not experience visuomotor integration deficits following their return to sport from an SRC, or whether a DT was required to detect persisting deficits. Most likely, the task developed in Study 1 may not have accurately assessed the enhancement of sport-specific training on athletes’ visuomotor integration capabilities and thus was unable to detect the impact of an SRC. As such, future research exploring athlete’s enhanced visuomotor integration and persisting visuomotor integration impairments following SRC should ensure the transferability of athletes’ training to the developed task and ensure that athletes demonstrate a high level of performance on the motor component of the task prior to the addition of a cognitive task.

Convocation Year

2026

Convocation Season

Fall

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Available for download on Sunday, August 05, 2029

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