Keep Your Eye on the Ball--er, Target

[fivepigs]

From an article in the Times:

Quiet Eye training, as the name suggests, is an attempt to get people to stop flicking their focus around so much. But “Quiet Eye training is not just about looking at the ball,” says Mark Wilson, who led the study, published in Psychophysiology, and is a senior lecturer in human movement science at the University of Exeter in England. “It is about looking at the ball for long enough to process aiming information.” It involves reminding players to first briefly sight toward the exact spot where they wish to send the ball, and then settle their eyes onto the ball and hold them there.

This tight focus on the ball, Dr. Wilson says, blunts distracting mental chatter and allows the brain “to process the aiming information you just gathered” and direct the body in the proper motions to get the ball where you wish it to go.

A quiet, focused eye, in other words, seems to encourage a quiet, focused mind, which then makes for more accurate putting.

And in fact, after Dr. Wilson had his golfing volunteers practice for hours on either specific aspects of stroke technique or on focusing their gaze and not worrying about technique, those who had worked on their gaze were more accurate than those who had fine-tuned their technique. Those trained to focus also had lower heart rates and less muscle twitchiness, indicating less performance anxiety.

Similar results have been reported among soccer penalty kickers, who, like golfers, need to precisely place a ball but have the added distraction of a peripatetic, obstructive goalie. Many players tend to glance at the goalie as they prepare to shoot. Their eyes are not quiet, and their aim is affected.

Is watching the ball more like watching the target or the reticle? Or does it matter?

Think you're already doing this? Don't be so sure:

Back in elementary school gym class, virtually all of us were taught to keep our eyes on the ball during sports. But a growing body of research suggests that, as adults, most of us have forgotten how to do this. When scientists in recent years have attached sophisticated, miniature gaze-tracking devices to the heads of golfers, soccer players, basketball free throw shooters, tennis players and even competitive sharpshooters, they have found that a majority are not actually looking where they believe they are looking or for as long as they think.

Might be something worth practicing.

[boats]

Joan Vickers at the University of Calgery has done extensive work on the "Quiet Eye" Remarkable results with sport from Basketball to Golf to Shooting sports. Her book is pretty deep, more textbook than shooter user. It's worth reading even though you have to skip over portions. I got a lot out of it and could see the result in scores. Limited my intest at first to static targets, now going through her sections on moving targets, for Sporting Clays.

Here is a link to one of her projects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWiGflJNFWk

Boats