The silent eye on winning athletics

Why do elite fencers succeed in a sport where decisions must be made in milliseconds? A new study published in Cortex suggests that the secret lies not only in faster reflexes, but also in a visual and neural phenomenon known as the calm eye.

The authors describe how the eyes remain focused before attacking movements, which appears to support the brain’s ability to filter out noise under pressure. The study by Andrade Vincze and employees, Relationships between gaze behavior and fencing performance of highly trained fencing athletes, used eye-tracking technology in fencers nationally to show that successful “touches” were preceded by significantly longer final visual fixations compared to unsuccessful ones.

The Calm eye Effect: The advantage of prolonged definitive fixation of gaze on a target before movement onset has been associated with self-paced tasks such as sinking a golf putt or shooting a free throw from a basketball, but this study extends such an advantage to the fast-moving competitive sport of fencing. The study found that elite fencers showed a longer silent eye period (the last fixation on a target) before a successful attacking move than on an unsuccessful one. The authors described earlier are related findings in table tenniswhere they recorded fixations on the opposite side or a narrow part of the table.

Attack vs Defense: In everyday life, the eyes tend to jump from fixating or pausing on one point to another as they scan the environment. These rapid eye movements are called saccades, parts of saccadic eye movements. In the screen study, the authors found a greater number of fixations when defending versus a single focus during attack.

Daily application: This gaze behavior may apply to other high-pressure perceptual-motor tasks, from tennis and pickleball to driving a car on a busy city street. In tennis, for example, top professional Roger Federer was known for keeping his eye and head on the ball as it struck and rebounded from his racket. The phenomenon has also been examined as a function of expert performance in minimally invasive surgery and surgical training.

Professor Joan Vickers introduced the silent eyes theory in the 1980s. She analyzed the gaze behavior of national-level basketball players during free throws and reported that expert players maintained a longer final fixation before starting their movements, compared to non-expert players.

She later described this gaze behavior as a final fixation or subsequent gaze fixated within a visual angle of 3 degrees and on a specific target in the environment, lasting 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second) or longer. This area of ​​research continued to explore the applications of coaching or training aimed at improving performance in areas as diverse as sports and surgery.

Limits. The research into viewing behavior during screens and table tennis involved a limited number of selected participants, but it is an extension of previous research into viewing behavior during other sports. Differences in the length of eye fixations were a matter of degree rather than all or nothing. How such narrow gaze behavior might interact with the situational awareness provided by wide-angle peripheral vision might be a topic for future consideration. For example, in baseball or football, players can use their peripheral vision to get an overview of the entire playing field without turning their heads

Saccadic eye movements are controlled by the frontal eye field in the frontal lobe of the brain in combination with other areas. How the brain connects visual behavior to the skilled movements that follow it was not a topic of this study, but visual focus on a target could improve visual attention while resisting distraction, planning and executing a skilled movement. Other neuroscience studies have studied the dorsal attention network in the brain, including the frontal eye field and regions of the parietal lobe, as a bridge between visual processing and motor performance.