Modern basketball is a fast-paced, highly competitive team sport that imposes integrated demands on athletes’ physical, perceptual, and cognitive capacities. During a 40 min elite basketball game, male and female players typically cover ~5–6 km and perform approximately 1,000 discrete actions, requiring speed or direction decisions almost every 2 s. More than 85% of these actions occur above the lactate threshold and at high relative intensities, producing sustained cardiovascular strain with frequent micro-intervals as movement patterns shift every 1–3 s (Stojanović et al., 2018; Dijkstra et al., 2014). In this unpredictable and variable basketball environment, success in training and competition depends not only on traditional loads like running distance or opponent level, but also on the ability to perceive and interpret in real time how situational factors such as close scores, winning streaks and congested schedules affect those loads (Fogt et al., 2021; Sansone et al., 2025). This includes scanning on-court information, recognizing tactical patterns, anticipating opponents, and making adaptive tactical decisions under intense time pressure (Hepler and Feltz, 2012; Ghorbanzadeh et al., 2025). Perceptual–cognitive ability has been identified as a key determinant of both agility and overall game performance (Zemková et al., 2025), with increasing evidence highlighting its role in distinguishing performance levels. In particular, elite athletes consistently outperform sub-elite counterparts in task-specific anticipation and decision-making scenarios (Kioumourtzoglou et al., 1998). As a result, the efficient integration of perceptual–cognitive processing with motor execution has become a decisive factor in competitive basketball, posing unprecedented demands on athletes’ comprehensive performance capacities.

However, although contemporary basketball training increasingly integrates physical, technical, and tactical components, many commonly used practice tasks still isolate specific “physical” or “cognitive” elements to manage coaching constraints and maintain controlled practice conditions. For example, pre-planned change-of-direction (COD) drills can enhance mechanical COD capacity, but because they are executed without an external stimulus, they should be interpreted as COD speed rather than agility (Sheppard and Young, 2006). Accordingly, such drills provide limited opportunities to couple movement execution with rapidly changing opponent- and ball-related visual information under genuine game pressure. Conversely, screen- or video-based perceptual tasks may improve decision accuracy in highly controlled settings, yet their transfer may be limited when perception, decision-making, and whole-body movement must be coordinated simultaneously on court (Nimphius et al., 2018). This practice-to-competition discrepancy reflects an ecological–control trade-off: laboratory-style tasks offer strong control but may under-represent perception–action coupling, whereas representative field tasks improve realism but reduce standardization (Renshaw et al., 2019). This practice-to-competition discrepancy reflects the ecological–control paradox: laboratory-style tasks offer strong experimental control but may under-represent perception–action coupling, whereas representative field tasks improve realism but reduce standardization. SVT can help reconcile this paradox because the stroboscopic eyewear provides a standardized and quantifiable manipulation of visual-information availability (e.g., strobe frequency and duty cycle) that can be applied consistently during on-court, basketball-specific drills. In this way, SVT preserves key sources of ecological validity (whole-body movement, ball–opponent interactions, time pressure, and real-time perception–decision–execution coupling) while retaining experimental controllability over perceptual load and its progression across sessions. This hybrid “controlled perturbation in a representative task” approach may therefore narrow the transfer gap by training players to maintain technical execution and decision quality when visual sampling is intermittently degraded. Therefore, embedding perceptual constraints within basketball-specific drills—such as stroboscopic visual training—may provide a pragmatic compromise to raise perceptual–cognitive demands while preserving representative movement patterns.

To address this gap, perceptual–cognitive training (PCT) has been increasingly used to enhance athletes’ ability to pick up, process, and act on task-relevant information under time pressure. Importantly, basketball-specific evidence supports the relevance and trainability of these skills. For instance, gaze-contingent perceptual training that selectively degraded parts of the visual field improved basketball video-based passing decision accuracy and showed retention effects, suggesting that decision-related information pickup can be trained using sport-specific stimuli (Ryu et al., 2016). In addition, dynamic visual attention measured via multiple-object tracking (MOT) has been linked to basketball match performance, with better tracking performance associated with more assists and steals (Jin et al., 2020), and visual tracking speed has also been associated with productivity indicators in elite (NBA) players (Mangine et al., 2014). Beyond correlational evidence, training studies indicate that MOT-based interventions can improve executive-function outcomes in basketball players (Xiao and Jiang, 2024), supporting the potential for PCT-related constraints to enhance cognitive–perceptual resources relevant to game play. Nevertheless, the ecological–control trade-off remains a central challenge, motivating field-compatible methods that preserve representative movement while systematically manipulating perceptual information.

Stroboscopic visual training (SVT) has emerged as an innovative method in response to the increasing demand for integrated athletic performance (Wilkins and Appelbaum, 2020). By employing stroboscopic glasses that introduce intermittent visual occlusion, SVT artificially induces “visual perturbations” or “stroboscopic load” within the visual channel (Jendrusch et al., 2023). These transient disruptions compel athletes to rely on internal prediction mechanisms, perceptual integration, and multisensory compensation to maintain motor execution. At its core, SVT elevates the processing demands within the perception–action pathway, driving neural adaptations that enhance information extraction and response efficiency under high cognitive load. This mechanism has been associated with improvements in visual sensitivity, reaction speed, and anticipatory ability (Fortes et al., 2025). Empirical studies have shown that SVT enhances visual search efficiency and attentional control and may promote neuroplastic adaptations that support improved motor control and decision-making (Wilkins and Gray, 2015). Promising outcomes have been documented across multiple open-skill sports when SVT is embedded into sport-specific practice tasks. In badminton, stroboscopic interventions have been shown to accelerate visuomotor reaction speed and improve sport-specific defensive performance (e.g., smash-defense), with evidence suggesting that gains may relate to faster visual motion processing rather than purely motor execution changes (Hülsdünker et al., 2019; Hülsdünker et al., 2021b). In volleyball, in-situ stroboscopic training integrated into standard technical drills has produced improvements in complex reaction speed and reactive-agility–related indices, and these changes have been linked to oculomotor adaptations such as altered saccade dynamics (Zwierko et al., 2024; Zwierko M. et al., 2023). In football/soccer contexts, SVT has also been applied within football-specific assessment settings, supporting the idea that intermittent visual occlusion can be implemented without fully removing the representativeness of the task constraints (Palmer et al., 2022).

Despite these potential benefits, the broader SVT literature highlights practical constraints and methodological inconsistencies that limit comparability and translation. Recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses report overall meaningful effects of SVT on both time-based and accuracy-based performance outcomes, while also emphasizing substantial heterogeneity in key prescription variables (e.g., device type, strobe-frequency range, duty-cycle definition and reporting, session duration, and progression rules) and frequent under-reporting of parameters required for reproducibility (e.g., exact Hz settings, duty-cycle progression, and dose-matching rationale) (Jothi et al., 2025; Luo et al., 2025). These reviews further suggest that training efficacy may depend on a “moderate” perturbation window—sufficient to challenge visual sampling and perception–action coupling, but not so severe that it degrades movement quality and alters task solutions—thereby underscoring the need for well-controlled, dose-matched trials that specify and justify strobe parameters within representative sport-specific drills (Wang Y. et al., 2025).

SVT may also help address the ecological control paradox in basketball because stroboscopic eyewear enables standardized, quantifiable manipulation of visual information availability (e.g., strobe frequency and duty cycle) that can be implemented consistently during on-court, basketball-specific drills (Wilkins and Gray, 2015). In this way, SVT can preserve key elements of ecological validity—including whole-body movement, ball–opponent interactions, time pressure, and real-time coupling of perception, decision-making, and action execution—while retaining experimental control over perceptual load and its phase-based progression (Ren et al., 2025). This hybrid approach, involving controlled perturbation within representative tasks, may train players to maintain technical execution and decision quality when visual sampling is intermittently disrupted, thereby narrowing the transfer gap (Wang R. et al., 2025). Given that basketball performance requires rapid visual sampling, continuous updating of opponent–ball information, and time-limited perception–action coupling, embedding stroboscopic perturbations within representative basketball drills may help athletes sustain decision quality and movement execution when visual information is degraded (Guo et al., 2025). Accordingly, a basketball-specific randomized trial that dose-matches sport-specific training content while manipulating only visual perturbation is warranted to clarify efficacy and inform practicable standardization (Zhao et al., 2025).

Accordingly, this study aims to systematically investigate the effects of combining SVT with sport-specific training on coordination, agility, and decision-making performance in collegiate basketball players. Through an eight-week randomized controlled trial, the study seeks to determine whether SVT can yield greater performance enhancements in competition-relevant tasks compared to conventional training methods. The findings are expected to elucidate the mechanisms by which visual perturbation influences the perception–action coupling process and to provide empirical evidence for developing standardized SVT protocols and multidimensional performance assessment frameworks. Ultimately, this study intends to offer both theoretical insights and practical guidance for optimizing integrated training strategies in basketball and other team sports.

A total of 42 participants completed the entire intervention, and all data were included in the final statistical analysis. The Shapiro–Wilk test confirmed that all outcome variables followed a normal distribution (p > 0.05). No significant between-group differences were observed in demographic characteristics (age, height, weight; see Table 1) or in baseline outcome measures: Completion Time (p = 0.358), Error Count (p = 0.851), Completion Time (p = 0.975), Left–Right Difference (p = 0.898), Decision Time (DT, p = 0.898), Motor Execution Time (MET, p = 0.330), Decision Accuracy (DA, p = 0.360), and the Cognitive–Motor Efficiency Index (CMEI, p = 0.140). Accordingly, a mixed-design analysis of variance (ANOVA) with time (TIME) and group (GROUP) as main factors was conducted to examine changes in coordination, agility, and decision-making indices across the three groups. Descriptive statistics for pre- and post-test measures are presented in Table 2, and interaction effects between time and group (TIME × GROUP) are illustrated in Figures 2–4.

This study examined the combined effects of SVTand on coordination, 505 change-of-direction speed, and decision-making in collegiate basketball players. The results showed that participants in the SVT + ST group outperformed those in the ST and RT groups across all performance domains. Specifically, the SVT + ST group demonstrated faster completion times in coordination and 505 change-of-direction speed tasks, shorter reaction and motor-execution times in decision-making assessments, and higher decision accuracy and cognitive–motor efficiency. Collectively, these findings suggest that integrating SVT into basketball-specific training yields substantial benefits for perceptual–motor performance, supporting the concept of perception–action integration in sport-specific contexts. The primary causal inference regarding SVT is based on the dose-matched comparison between SVT + ST and ST, where training content and exposure were identical and only the visual perturbation differed. It is important to emphasize that, although the present study employed standardized tests that were designed to approximate basketball game demands, whether the observed improvements generalize to competitive match performance remains uncertain. Competitive basketball imposes additional constraints, including opponent pressure, tactical variability, and fluctuations in physical and mental fatigue, which cannot be fully represented in controlled assessments of coordination, change-of-direction speed, or simulated decision-making tasks. Accordingly, the findings should be interpreted as evidence that SVT improves test-based perception-action and cognition-action performance under standardized conditions, rather than as a demonstration of direct improvements in real match performance.

The SVT ± ST group demonstrated greater improvements in coordination than the ST and RT groups, primarily evidenced by shorter completion times on the coordination test. By intermittently disrupting visual input, stroboscopic vision requires participants to sustain stable motor execution under conditions of incomplete visual information, thereby enhancing visuomotor integration and promoting the use of predictive control (Jothi et al., 2025; Sudesan et al., 2023). This account closely matches the task demands of basketball, in which dribbling, receiving/passing, and shot preparation depend on rapid cue extraction and hand–eye coordination under substantial time pressure (Güner et al., 2024; Dako et al., 2024). When visual sampling is interrupted, the central nervous system may rely more heavily on feedforward control and internal prediction to preserve movement quality; consequently, once normal vision is restored, training benefits may be expressed as more efficient motor organization and execution (Pekna et al., 2012). Previous research mainly comprises two lines of evidence: acute exposure studies and periodized training interventions. In a controlled design, Ellison et al. (2020) implemented SVT and assessed hand-eye coordination using an electronic reaction light system. Their findings showed improvements in relevant response measures after SVT, indicating that visuomotor integration may be trainable. Wilkins et al. (2018) reported improved perceptual response performance in elite adolescent football goalkeepers, consistent with the notion that manipulating visual information availability may facilitate more efficient visual processing and motor control strategies. Importantly, most of this evidence comes from other open-skill sports or generic tasks, and the movement constraints do not fully correspond to key basketball situations. Basketball imposes high demands on visual sampling and rapid movement adjustment under ongoing opposition, and is characterized by strong continuous closed-loop control requirements (Newell and Rovegno, 2021). Against this backdrop, embedding SVT within sport-specific training and observing larger improvements on coordination tests may reflect increased training demands on perception-action coupling while maintaining task representativeness (Carrolla et al., 2021). Periodized evidence also supports the rationale for progressive load scheduling. For example, Hülsdünker et al. (2019) reported in elite badminton athletes that SVT was associated with improvements in visual function and sport-specific visuomotor performance. Moreover, a series of studies by Hülsdünker et al. (2021a) focusing on MSSE suggests that visuomotor reaction speed may exhibit both short-term and long-term adaptations. Taken together, the coordination gains observed following the phase-based progressive training in the present study may relate to more efficient cue use, enhanced predictive control, and improved movement stability. At the same time, SVT effects are task-specific and context-dependent (Mitroff et al., 2013). Some findings indicate that changes in dribbling performance under restricted visual feedback may be moderated by factors such as skill level (Luo et al., 2025). Accordingly, the mechanistic account offered here remains an inference consistent with the behavioral outcomes, and future work should integrate eye-tracking and neurophysiological measures to test the proposed processes more directly. SVT was shown to significantly improve change-of-direction speed and reactive agility in collegiate basketball players while simultaneously reducing, to some extent, asymmetry between left- and right-side responses. These outcomes likely result from SVT accelerating the transformation of visual input into motor output, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of reaction processes. In a study involving youth volleyball players, Zwierko M. et al. (2023) found that after 6 weeks of SVT intervention, participants demonstrated markedly greater visually induced reactive agility than those in the control group. Similarly, Hülsdünker et al. (2021a) reported that 10 weeks of SVT reduced visuomotor reaction time in elite youth badminton players from 251 ms to 238 ms, corresponding to a 5.2% decrease (d = 0.63), and the improvement was largely retained after 6 weeks (241 ms; 4.0% below baseline; d = 0.50), indicating a sustained enhancement in visuomotor reaction speed. In terms of bilateral agility balance, athletes in the SVT group exhibited reduced asymmetry in change-of-direction responses, reflecting more symmetrical agility performance. This improvement may stem from SVT’s simultaneous stimulation of bilateral visual pathways and motor control systems, which enhances neuromuscular coordination, particularly on the non-dominant side. Supporting this interpretation, Lu et al. (2025) reported that collegiate male soccer players who underwent balance training combined with SVT achieved significant improvements in both dominant- and non-dominant-leg stability, alongside notable reductions in inter-limb functional differences. Regarding bilateral performance, we observed a reduction in left–right asymmetry in change-of-direction (COD) responses in the SVT group, indicating a shift toward more symmetrical COD performance. This finding may be practically meaningful in basketball, where frequent stop–start actions, defensive slides, and cutting to both sides can foster side-preferential strategies; accordingly, stable limb-to-limb differences are often seen with prolonged training and competitive exposure (Shimokochi et al., 2013; Stacoff et al., 1996). One plausible explanation is that intermittent visual disruption under stroboscopic vision reduces the continuity of visual input, making athletes less reliant on online visual corrections during rapid foot placement, braking, and re-acceleration. In turn, they may rely more on feedforward control and proprioceptive monitoring to stabilize trunk and lower-limb mechanics (Elliott and Bennett, 2021; Zennou-Azogui et al., 1996). For the non-dominant side, a control strategy that emphasizes internal prediction and sensory feedback may be especially conducive to improving movement stability and timing consistency, thereby narrowing left–right discrepancies (Sullivan and Rodewald, 2012; Das et al., 2025). In addition, our SVT ± ST training embedded visual perturbation within sport-specific drills that combined bi-directional COD with response selection. This likely provided the non-dominant side with more frequent and higher-quality exposure to decision-coupled deceleration–acceleration demands, facilitating a “catch-up” adaptation and reducing inter-limb asymmetry.

Athletes who underwent SVT demonstrated notable improvements in decision reaction time, judgment accuracy, and motor execution speed, suggesting that SVT exerts a substantial positive influence on perceptual–cognitive decision-making. These enhancements likely result from increased neural processing efficiency within the perception–action pathway (Li et al., 2024). On one hand, SVT has been shown to facilitate neural transmission along the dorsal visual stream—particularly through the magnocellular (M) pathway—by accelerating motion-related visual processing and potentially inducing neurophysiological changes such as alpha-wave phase resetting. Supporting this mechanism, Zwierko T. et al. (2023) found that after 6 weeks of SVT, handball players exhibited significantly reduced P100 latency in visual evoked potentials, particularly in the dominant eye and binocular peripheral pathways, indicating faster early-stage visual processing. Enhanced perceptual extraction enables athletes to identify and prioritize key visual cues more efficiently in complex, dynamic environments, thereby reducing decision reaction time (Huang et al., 2018). On the other hand, SVT appears to strengthen predictive and attentional control mechanisms within the brain, which together improve judgment accuracy and motor efficiency. Previous work indicates that training under intermittent (stroboscopic) vision can enhance visual information encoding and short-term retention, thereby improving the ability to use brief, transient cues when visual sampling is constrained (Appelbaum et al., 2011). Building on this framework, the concurrent improvements in decision speed and accuracy observed in the present study may reflect more efficient extraction of task-relevant cues within shortened viewing windows and better maintenance of those cues during occlusion gaps, reducing reliance on late, online corrections during action execution (Jothi et al., 2025; Ren et al., 2025). In addition, intermittent vision likely increases attentional engagement and supports motion extrapolation/anticipatory timing processes, which can facilitate earlier and more consistent response initiation under time pressure—consistent with the observed gains in reaction-based outcomes and perceptual–motor efficiency (Ballester et al., 2017).

Although the findings of this study are broadly consistent with previous research supporting the performance-enhancing effects of SVT, certain discrepancies remain. For example, Palmer et al. (2022) reported that a four-week SVT program did not significantly improve dribbling or ball-control ability in youth soccer players. The authors suggested that the complex technical and tactical demands of soccer may require a longer intervention period or greater contextual integration of SVT into game-like scenarios to produce measurable benefits. In contrast, the present study observed significant improvements in coordination, change-of-direction speed, and decision-making among basketball players, indicating that the effectiveness of SVT may depend on sport-specific skill structures and movement characteristics. Additionally, previous research has emphasized different performance domains. Zwierko M. et al. (2023) found that SVT primarily enhances visuomotor responsiveness closely linked to motor execution, whereas its influence on purely sensory functions, such as peripheral visual acuity, appears limited. Similarly, Appelbaum et al. (2011) demonstrated that SVT improves information-processing efficiency in central vision but has a weaker impact on peripheral perceptual sensitivity. The current findings, which focus on coordination, 505 change-of-direction speed, and decision-making—abilities highly dependent on perception–action coupling—suggest that SVT may exert its strongest effects in performance areas where visual perception and motor execution are tightly integrated. Nevertheless, some studies have reported mild adverse reactions during SVT training. For instance, Vasile and Stănescu (2024) noted slight dizziness and visual fatigue among participants in a climbing-based SVT program. Although no such effects were observed in the present research, these reports highlight the necessity of monitoring individual tolerance levels and carefully adjusting strobe frequency, duration, and progression to ensure safety and long-term feasibility in applied training contexts.

Although this study demonstrated that SVT combined with basketball-specific training can enhance coordination, agility, and decision-making in collegiate basketball players, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, the relatively small sample size and the inclusion of only male athletes from a single university limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research should expand the participant pool to include athletes of different genders, competitive levels, and regional backgrounds to improve external validity and representativeness. Second, the intervention period of 8 weeks and the absence of follow-up assessments restrict the ability to determine the persistence and cumulative effects of SVT. Future studies should extend the duration of training and incorporate medium- and long-term follow-ups to systematically evaluate the sustainability and potential dose–response relationship of SVT-induced adaptations. Third, the outcome variables in this study were primarily behavioral—coordination, 505 change-of-direction speed, and decision-making—without inclusion of neurophysiological or biomechanical measures. This limits the understanding of the underlying mechanisms driving the observed improvements. Incorporating neural imaging, electrophysiological, or eye-tracking indicators in future work could help elucidate how SVT affects the perception–action coupling process at the neural level. Fourth, participants in the present study represent a collegiate performance level; therefore, the findings may not generalize to higher-performance or professional players. Following the participant classification framework proposed by McKay et al. (2022), future studies should explicitly report training/performance caliber and test SVT effects across multiple competitive tiers. In addition, we did not directly quantify or control physical and mental fatigue status (e.g., sleep/wellness, accumulated training stress, or pre-testing cognitive load), which may influence both perceptual–cognitive and skilled performance and contribute to inter-individual variability in training responses. Given evidence that mental fatigue can impair sport-related performance, future SVT studies should incorporate standardized fatigue monitoring (e.g., wellness/sleep questionnaires, session-RPE and training-load metrics, and mental-fatigue ratings) and, where possible, standardize recovery and testing timing relative to training load. Finally, whether the improvements in decision-making performance observed under simulated conditions can transfer effectively to real-game scenarios remains uncertain. Subsequent research should adopt ecologically valid performance metrics and on-court behavioral analyses to verify the transferability of SVT effects to competitive play.

Integrating SVT into conventional basketball-specific programs significantly enhances coordination, 505 change-of-direction speed, and decision-making in collegiate basketball players. Compared with athletes who received only sport-specific training, those in the SVT group achieved greater improvements across these domains, indicating the additional benefits of incorporating perceptual-interference methods. By introducing intermittent visual occlusion to increase perceptual–cognitive load, this combined training approach effectively reinforces athletes’ perception–action integration, enabling superior performance in complex and dynamic environments. Overall, the integration of SVT with sport-specific training demonstrates positive effects on both physical and cognitive aspects of athletic ability, offering theoretical insight and practical guidance for optimizing training program design. Future studies should further investigate the long-term efficacy of SVT and its potential integration with other training modalities to achieve more comprehensive performance enhancement.