John Brenton, PhD
Dr John Brenton, PhD lectures Acquisition of Skill and Motor Learning within the Discipline of Sports Science and Exercise Physiology at Murdoch University. His research has advanced the study of how elite cricketers use anticipatory skills to predict the ball type when batting.
Visual anticipation differentiates elite and less skilled players and enables the capability to cope with high time constraints in striking sports.
John investigated how advanced information from obtained the bowler, known as perception, influences positioning of the body to enable striking of the ball, known as action. The combination of these two factors improves the batter’s decision-making and ultimately contact the ball.
“No one has really measured the link perception and action together in this way before, and I thought it would be interesting to see how elite batters use this early information to make better contact with the ball.”
Dr John Brenton’s study involved cricketers from the WACA batting against a ball being bowled. Either just after the ball was released by the bowler or just before the ball bounced, the batter’s sight was blocked. They had to make contact with the ball without vision.
The impressive part of the study came when Dr John Brenton discovered that these batters could still hit the ball with supreme accuracy despite not seeing it. “We found that all of the batters have different patterns for using the early information, but no matter what they were, all were able to make equal shots on the ball,” In the larger sense, the study proved that there is no ‘best way’ for a batter to prepare to hit the ball, as long as it works for them.
Dr John Brenton presented his findings to the 5th Annual World Congress of Science and Medicine in Cricket in 2014 and believes this will change the way cricket is coached at all levels.
John’s PhD further advanced knowledge in this area, in particular, the learning and transfer of visual anticipation skill in cricket batting. Findings from his PhD were presented at the 50th Anniversary of North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA) Conference in 2016.
A particularly exciting contribution is that the novel perceptual training paradigm developed by Dr John Brenton is so simple to execute and therefore is likely to have a major impact on how perceptual skills are developed in a wide range of fastball sports. 
From an applied perspective, Dr John Brenton provides the practitioner with glimpses into some novel training and assessment manipulations.