Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

What are the scientific principles relating to eye dominance? i.e. What makes one eye dominant or the like.

This is not for a science fair but for a student research project where my aim is to investigate the effects of eye dominance on basketball shooting percentage.

I got my Idea from your website: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p021.shtml

If you could answer ASAP that would be great as it is due monday (sunday night US time)

Thanks
James

This may not be the best forum to be asking your questions in because there are multiple scientific disiplines involved. There maybe some experts in the Life, Earth, and Social Sciences forum that can provide additional information.

The brain is primarily responsible for the choice of eye dominance and hand dominance. If there were ever any differences in vision between the two eyes and the eye-brain nerve system, the brain's choice was probably affected by the differences. There are also people where the eye dominance is affected by distance. I happen to be one of those people where distance vision is dominated by one eye and near vision is dominated by the other eye and there is a cross-over point.

Basket ball skills include a significant amount of depth perception which ususally requires information from both eyes so eye dominance isn't the only factor.

Hand-eye coordination involved and hand dominance may be involved in eye dominance. For example when dribbling the ball in the right hand to to the side of the body, the ball may not even be in the left eye's field of view and vice-versa.

Other basketball skills involve peripheral vision, particularly peripheral motion recognition. Because there is little peripheral field of view overlap, this recognition is independent of eye-dominance; however, eye dominance may be a factor in any differences in the ability to pick out moving objects in different areas of peripheral field of view.