Reflexion has just released a new assessment tool to assist in neuro-cognitive training: Reflexion Score 2021. This is a set of five values that relate to five important cognitions that determine performance during every sport: Eye-Hand Coordination, Inhibition, Prioritization, Reaction Time, and Tracking.
The Reflexion Score Assessment
The assessment can be taken once a month. During the assessment you will play through several drills that best determine your capability in these five cognitive areas. Do your absolute best during the assessment! Training daily on different Reflexion drills will give you the best practice.
The results are presented as scores from 0-100, showing where you stand compared to the theoretical maximum limits of human performance. Reflexion drills are no cake walk, so don’t expect to hit the top scores without undergoing extensive cognitive training.
The results are also presented in a spider graph, comparing each cognition to the others. This shows where your cognitive strengths are, and any potential room for improvements. A filled-in circular area indicates that you are well-rounded, while spikes or dips show exceptional skill in that cognition compared to the others (or lack thereof). The more overall area that’s filled-in shows that you’re overflowing with cognitive excellence!
Your ratings in these five cognitive skills can help direct where you need to focus training and specialization. Each cognition is meaningful to different people in different ways based on the skills that pay the bills. No matter what you do or what your role is, you’re likely to find yourself engaging in these cognitions every day and with every play.
Eye-Hand Coordination
Measures how well you can accurately move your hands and fingers to a specific place in your visual field. Eye-hand coordination is the most fundamental cognition for every athlete. This is connecting with the ball, blocking the punch while connecting with your own, intercepting with more than just luck, and so much more. Given the high standards of professionals, we assess this ability with sub-millimeter precision, so don’t miss the center of the target!
The importance of eye-hand coordination is limitless. Nearly every physical activity with the hands requires accurate interaction with vision. The better the cognitive skill of coordinating hand motor activity with the visual information in your brain, the more you’re able to fine-tune and control how you engage with the world around you.
Inhibition
This measures how well you can stop yourself from an action that you are prepared to conduct and how quickly you can determine when to act in the face of distractions. Your brain is constantly being bombarded with information, most of which is inhibited so that limited attention resources are engaged with meaningful information. High Inhibition scores means that you can throw out the noise in order to act meaningfully and react to the things you want to.
It might seem odd that not doing something is a cognitive ability. But you know what they say: “Check it before you wreck it.” Wise words, because being better able to inhibit inappropriate actions helps you maintain focus on appropriate actions and being prepared to respond to what matters. Proper training in Inhibition means you won’t be tricked out by a feint maneuver or distraction from your opponents.
Prioritization
Understanding what needs to be done now versus later is critical in many circumstances. Prioritization measures how well you can manage multiple competing demands for your attention in a limited time frame. You can survive longer and achieve a higher score in our assessment drill by making sure you hit high-priority targets before it’s too late and ignoring low-priority targets when you’re running short on time.
Prioritization comes in many different forms in life. Many decisions in sports have to be made in less than one second. The kind of Prioritization we measure with the Reflexion Score is very fast-paced, assessing your capability to make many split-second decisions while following through with rapid action in a constantly changing visual environment.
Reaction Time
Reaction Time is a measure of how quickly you can initiate an action, whatever that action might be. Slowness to react to events around you can lead to injury and tragedy of all sorts, while quickness of response wins the day. We measure your Reaction Time capabilities to the sub-millisecond. Delaying will lose the game, and you’ll get a lousy assessment score.
The neural circuits that send information from your eyes, through the brain, down the spinal cord, and to the muscles for motor activity have a mechanical limit. But don’t be fooled by a neuroscientist like me! Those circuits can be trained and developed to operate faster than fast, reducing the time it takes to initiate correct responses to less than ¼ of a second.
Tracking
Most activities in sports do not have you engaging with a static environment. You might need to follow a hockey puck blasting back and forth across the ice, the pace of a dribbled basketball right before you go in for the swipe-and-steal, or the shifting legwork controlling a soccer ball. Objects are often moving at different speeds compared to your own movement, becoming larger or smaller in your visual field, and changing directions. Tracking is the cognition of how well you can follow a target and maintain hand coordination in response to rapid velocity changes.
Anything from watching cars in traffic moving around you while driving to following a ball as it’s thrown around a field from person to person involves good Tracking cognition. If you lose sight of the object you’re tracking, you might not be able to find it again fast enough to avoid disaster! Efficient Tracking keeps your eyes and coordinated body movements locked on target for as long as needed, responding as quickly as needed. Tracking means you can monitor your opponent’s every move as they make it, and be ready to respond with the right moves.
