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Sporttechie.com |
An Israeli-based company called Applied Cognitive Engineering
(ACE), that has worked with the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and has trained fighter
pilots, created a video game-like system called the Hockey IntelliGym to improve player performance
on the ice.
Hockey players have been seeing major benefits and
improvements in all aspects of their game thanks to the IntelliGym system. The
skills needed to make shots, avoid injury, plan skate paths, and recognize
opportunities are all trainable outside the rink.
The Hockey IntelliGym is based on a concept
originally created for Air Force fighter pilots by an Israeli researcher, Prof.
Daniel Gopher. His goal was to train the brains of pilots on the land, using a
cognitive trainer or simulator, so they would be better prepared for all the
intangibles they could face in the air. The goal was to make anticipated
challenges almost instinctive. The system was called Space Fortress.
Following great success, Gopher’s team joined forces with ACE
to bring their revolutionary technological genius to sports. The Hockey
IntelliGym system they created has shook the whole hockey world within its
first three years and has proven to be the premiere training needed to take
your game to new levels.
Studies have confirmed that attention control is a skill that can applied across different settings
Cognitive scientists have determined that the brain can be
trained, just like any muscle in the gym or on the ice. The daily repetition of
mental endurance, flexibility, and thinking on the fly, can all be taught just
as easy as learning to skate or shoot a puck. Mental excellence has been proven
by IntelliGym to be measurable, but more importantly, changeable.
“It has been shown that if trained, such attention control
skills could be transferred and generalized across different settings and
different task requirements, as long as the tasks maintained the same
processing modality.” (Gopher, Armony & Greenshpan, 2000; Armony &
Gopher, 2002).
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| A training performance evaluation discussing the reflection of mental skills and on ice performance |
In a 1994 study by Gopher and his team,
cadets that had undergone a minimum of 10 hours of “gameplay” in Gopher’s new
cognitive system, results identified more than a 30-percent improvement rate in
flight performance in two of the leading air forces in the world. NASA was so
blown away by the results Gopher’s team was seeing that they hired cognitive
scientists to perform a study on cadets who either had or had not used Gopher’s
system to see if they could pass an Apache helicopter simulator. The results
showed a 100 percent success rate with the cadets that had used Gopher’s
system, and only an 18 percent success rate with those who had not.
