Why Athletes Need A 'Quiet Eye'
July 3, 2018 4:29 AM   Subscribe

Psychologists and neuroscientists have now identified some of the common mental processes that mark out elite athletes such as [Serena] Williams. And one of the most intriguing aspects appears to be a phenomenon known as the “quiet eye” – a kind of enhanced visual perception that allows the athlete to eliminate any distractions as they plan their next move. Intriguingly, quiet eye appears to be particularly important at times of stress, preventing the athlete from ‘choking’ at moments of high pressure. It may even lead to the mysterious ‘flow state’. [sl BBC Future]
posted by ellieBOA (32 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
I can't be the only person who at first read this as 'queer eye'
posted by garlicsmack at 4:57 AM on July 3, 2018 [6 favorites]


It's what Cristiano Ronaldo does before free kicks
posted by chavenet at 5:09 AM on July 3, 2018


Maybe I missed something reading through the article. Heaven knows that the commonsense explanation is not always the correct explanation -- but isn't the commonsense explanation that "quiet eye" is just a side effect of being able to calm your nerves?
posted by inconstant at 6:23 AM on July 3, 2018


I could do this in high school soccer, and I was never "elite". Everyone else could too.
posted by Brocktoon at 6:26 AM on July 3, 2018


I can't be the only person who at first read this as 'queer eye'

I was so excited

The eye thing is cool too tho
posted by schadenfrau at 6:32 AM on July 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


So, this isn't quite the corner of eye movements I did for my PhD (that was saccadic remapping and presaccadic attention, looking at the question of how the visual system gets the information it needs to make eye movements and keep your percept of the world stable across eye movements), but it's pretty close. So, what follows are a few thoughts on these results, as a "I just walked into lab and need to cool off before I can Science" stream of consciousness.

Without spending my morning diving into the papers here (most of which my institution doesn't buy access to, which is kind of interesting in its own right), the "quiet eye" describes a preaction fixation pattern with increased spatial accuracy in experts relative to non-experts. The idea that it "eliminates distractions" or "enhances visual perception" seems like a bit of a stretch, since those are both hard to quantify. What it probably does is to provide more accurate spatial localization of the target of the motor action (e.g., hitting the tennis ball), and that's going to be strongly coupled to expertise in understanding the behavior of objects in the world (how the ball bounces off the court, for instance). I don't know if I'd call that "enhancing perception", because I'd associate that with a more detailed representation of the object, and I'd guess this is mostly localization, rather than identity.

It's not too surprising that the visual system wants as much spatial accuracy as it can get right before an action, and that it's a feature of expertise within a sport, because expert-level performance is going to be, in large part, a function of that localization information. It's interesting that you can train awareness of fixation behaviors to get this effect, although there's been other evidence that you can train for saccade patterns for specific tasks, so it's not too surprising. Doing it well is going to be tricky (most eyetrackers don't really like it if you run around, although head-mounted trackers do exist, they're just extra-hard to use well).

Not that anyone would be able to do this with a headmounted tracker, but it'd be really interesting to see what the microsaccadic pattern looked like during these fixations (microsaccades are tiny eye movements during a fixation to maximize information acquisition by moving the image very slightly on the retina). I'd wonder if experts show more microsaccade activity than non-experts, because they're trying to get the best information they can.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 7:19 AM on July 3, 2018 [39 favorites]


posted by Making You Bored For Science

Username absolutely does not check out.
posted by Dysk at 7:22 AM on July 3, 2018 [20 favorites]


OK, I find this a bit overblown. Stripping away the clickbait trappings:

1. The video of that golfer in the lab did not look particularly still, or at least not still enough for this whole concept to be named after a steady gaze. He barely paused while putting. There's far more to this than just slowing the sweep of your vision for a moment.

2. This seems more relevant for skills that are small and precise than for broad actions. Putting in golf, hitting a baseball, serving in tennis and the like are highly drilled, repeated motions that come together in a split second of coordination. You need just the same level of concentration on defense, for example, but you can't focus your eyes in the same way. Anyone trying to cover Ronaldo in a big match is going to be as dialed in as he can get, yet the eyes are not going to be still. It feels more like a measurable effect than a cause.

3. I do believe, however, you could use visual focus drills to help get you mentally focused. Those results do intuitively makes sense. This may be more akin to the recent studies that show slowing your breathing with deep exhales actually calms your body and your mind. That is, clear the mind except for the details of the task immediately at hand. At the end of the piece:
Williams herself is under no illusions about what is most important.

“I’ve won most of my matches – probably all of my grand slams – because of what’s upstairs, not anything else,” she told Sports Illustrated in 2015. A large part of that may be the kind of calm focus that comes from the quiet eye.

“If you are behind in a game, it’s so important to relax, and that’s what I do – when I’m behind in a game, that’s when I become most relaxed,” she added. “Just focus on one point at a time… just that sole point, and then the next one, and the next one.”

posted by Cris E at 7:49 AM on July 3, 2018


Hey, we're about to have our own little vision science conference on MeFi!

To add to Making You Bored For Science's excellent comment, I want to dive into a bit about why "quiet eye" might be adaptive.

As you read this sentence, you are making rapid eye movements, called "saccades," to shift the focus of your eyes in discrete little hops across the line of the sentence (and then at the end of the line, down to the next sentence). Humans tend to make multiple saccades per second during tasks like reading, driving, and playing sports, often without being aware of these tiny motor movements. And I do mean tiny. It takes about 100 ms for your brain to plan a saccade to a new location, and about 50 ms for the actual motor movement of your eyeballs rotating in their orbits. Here's the neat part: if you think about it, for each saccade, the light information that is hitting your retina is changing with every. Single. Saccade. Every time you move your eyes, you are upending the visual input your brain receives. But we aren't aware of that disruption. We perceive a stable visual world. How?

Right when your brain says "make a saccade," you shut down taking in new visual input until after the saccade ends. That means your system is effectively blind to new information while you're moving your eyes. Which makes sense -- all that information would just be blurry and streaky anyway because we move our eyes so quickly. When your eye lands, you get that new information and you re-map or refresh your previous knowledge of the world with the new visual information.

Note that at every step in this process -- choosing the next location you're going to look at, making the motor movement, and then re-mapping -- is a noisy process, so each point can introduce perceptual errors. All this stuff I've said so far about saccades is pretty well understood.

I'm going to naively hypothesize here that "quiet eye" helps athletes specifically because if you aren't making saccades, you aren't undergoing saccadic suppression. Fewer saccades, less suppression, less having to re-map the locations of relevant information.

Possibly. :)
posted by nicodine at 7:54 AM on July 3, 2018 [21 favorites]


I have experienced this a couple of times and I am by no means an elite athlete.

I used to race motorcycles at the club level (I was with WERA, which is roughly equivalent to SCCA in the car world.) One day during a race I was riding the front straight at Road Atlanta and I thought, "Oh, Elmer's here." I saw a friend of mine in the stands without looking at the stands, while riding about 130mph.

Straights are the easiest parts of the track, so on some level I let my mind wander while in a heightened state of acuity.
posted by workerant at 7:56 AM on July 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


This seems more relevant for skills that are small and precise than for broad actions. Putting in golf, hitting a baseball, serving in tennis and the like are highly drilled, repeated motions that come together in a split second of coordination. You need just the same level of concentration on defense, for example, but you can't focus your eyes in the same way.

Well, on defense you still need to hit the ball. So you would expect to see the same phenomenon happen once the trajectory of the ball is clear, just before the hit. As you observed yourself, it is a quick, fleeting rest of the gaze, so it doesn't strike me as unreasonable that there is time for that to occur as part of a reaction as well?
posted by Dysk at 7:57 AM on July 3, 2018


Making You Bored For Science, I suspect we could have some fun shop talk over beers or something sometime. The corner of eye movements I did for my Ph.D. was a bit further up the cognitive chain, looking at visual orienting during social information seeking, but my boss has recently become strongly interested in the topic of this FPP.

My take on this is very similar to yours. I suspect the "quiet eye" fixation/saccade patterns are part of a feedback loop, with focused, expert attention manifesting in a stereotyped pattern of eye movements, which themselves also help to optimize the visual system's information-gathering processes for guiding other motor behaviors.

It actually puts me in mind a bit of some of the research on social gaze in autism spectrum disorder. Neurotypical individuals generally show highly stereotyped scan patterns when looking at faces, with fixations focused around the eyes and mouth. Individuals with ASD show very different scan patterns, revealing a disruption to the sort of "innate expertise" neurotypical individuals have for where the valuable sources of information on a face are. However, children with ASD can be taught how to "read" a face, essentially instructing their eye movements, and this actually results in long-term improvements in overall social function. It looks like some of the problems in processing social information commonly associated with ASD come not from a lack of ability to understand social cues in any innate sense, but from a lack of experience with them due to never really seeing them from an early age.

The training focused on helping people develop this "quiet eye" phenomenon seems like it may be somewhat similar to social gaze training in this sense. By mimicking the gaze scan patterns used by experts, you expose yourself to similar sources of information that they use, which can help train you to perform better over time.
posted by biogeo at 7:57 AM on July 3, 2018 [14 favorites]


Okay, how many vision/eye movement reseachers are there are on MeFi?
posted by biogeo at 7:59 AM on July 3, 2018 [15 favorites]


And should we be planning a MetaFilter satellite social at SfN this year?
posted by biogeo at 8:02 AM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't know jack about vision, although I'm enjoying all your commentary immensely, but I'll definitely be at SFN. So maybe?
posted by sciatrix at 8:35 AM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


false alarm, got sbn and sfn confused, oops
posted by sciatrix at 8:40 AM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Heh, I sort of tangentially do vision research as well, but in jumping spiders. I monitored retinal movement of spiders as they targeted a moving fly and i found that if the flies show erratic movements, the spiders retinae fluctuate a lot and it takes them longer to attack. If the fly is moving predictably, the spiders show lesser amounts of retinal fluctuation and can attack with higher chance of success. On topic, though, I don’t know how they can distinguish between intense focus and mere quiet eye, but since I tend to think that the eye is really part of the brain, it may not make sense to separate the two.
posted by dhruva at 8:43 AM on July 3, 2018 [8 favorites]


Heh, I sort of tangentially do vision research as well, but in jumping spiders.

can i be your friend
posted by biogeo at 8:45 AM on July 3, 2018 [7 favorites]


Note that at every step in this process -- choosing the next location you're going to look at, making the motor movement, and then re-mapping -- is a noisy process, so each point can introduce perceptual errors.

Like the queer eye thing! It's the thread that demonstrates its own content!
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 9:17 AM on July 3, 2018


Well, that's fun to figure out: nicodine and I are in very similar corners of vision science, and have known each other IRL since what, 2008 or so...
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 9:31 AM on July 3, 2018 [9 favorites]


I'm an dart player that often competes on the professional level. The calm focus of being in the flow state is really amazing. Everything is easy, you can't miss, and you're not trying that hard. I feel like when heroin addicts talk about chasing the dragon of their first high I recognize that desire when I want to get into that "flow".
posted by ShakeyJake at 10:26 AM on July 3, 2018 [5 favorites]


There's a scene in Nth Man comic where Doc Yagyu is teaching John how to focus in to the catcher's mitt and block outside noise. Reading this reminds me of that... I wonder if that's what Larry Hama was getting at.
posted by symbioid at 10:39 AM on July 3, 2018


Metafilter: It's vision/eye movement reseachers all the way down.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:59 AM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye."
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:06 PM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


In dog agility (my sport/addiction of choice), this happens, and if you're doing things right, it happens with you AND your canine partner at the same time. But when it does happen, it's amazing. A big part of practicing is working on developing the mental connection between you and your dog, which, when it happens, is spooky and cool as hell (it's like you have telepathy, in fact a friend who knows nothing about agility asked me how the dog knew what she was supposed to do, and I said "what do you think I'm doing?"). And I'm nowhere near at the elite level of the sport, I'm just pretty good.

The first time I competed at a national event with thousands of dogs competing and tons of spectators plus live webcasts and knowing my family and friends were watching, I was so aware of everything other than my dog: the announcer talking about us, the spectators watching us (I even noticed someone making a comment about my dog as we ran past), the judge, the lighting, the signs, the footing....everything other than what I really needed to focus on. After a few more years of experience under my belt, and several more national events too, I now find that I ONLY see my dog and the obstacles, and if I've done my warm up work properly, my dog really only sees me and the obstacles.

So I don't know if a dog can also have a "quiet eye", but it sure seems like it.
posted by biscotti at 1:58 PM on July 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


You could never accuse me of being an athlete, but playing games I have a very clear sense of the distinction between looking normally at things, focussing here and there, and an sort of unfocussed overview, where my gaze stays steady and it feels like instead of only looking at a particular point, my awareness diffuses out over what I need to see.

I don't think it's really related to the article, but this reminded me of a fun thing I liked to do as a kid. Pick a spot on a lawn or patterned surface, and keep looking straight at it. It breaks if you even glance to the side, but if you relax, the details gradually fade away, flowers and dry patches disappear, and it just becomes a perfect field of grassness. It's surprising seeing everything pop back in to view the moment your gaze shifts.
posted by lucidium at 4:10 PM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Looks like saccadic remapping is blowing up on twitter (not really, but interesting thread)

I know that people are designing neural nets with attention models, dunno how biologically similar they are.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:11 PM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


I have definitely experienced what seems to be the "quiet eye" phenomenon while drawing.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:50 PM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


If this is what I think it is, most competent jugglers have it. I’ve noticed it most when working on a passing pattern at the edge of my ability; clubs come in a pattern, but from multiple directions and the pattern is complicated, and you’ve got to be able to make small adjustments on the fly due to small variations in your passing partners’ throws, or in the wind speed, or etc. and actually looking directly at any one object means you aren’t going to see the others, and that’s how you get hit in the head. So you look at none of them and somehow that works better.

Of course you aren’t really seeing all of the details of any of the objects.. once a partner dropped a club, and somehow managed to pick up his shoe instead, and said shoe got quite a ways around the pattern before someone said “hey that’s a shoe!” Its shoeness was much less important than its location and speed, I suppose.
posted by nat at 5:52 AM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Its shoeness was much less important than its location and speed, I suppose.

The Heisenbrogan Principle.
posted by Etrigan at 6:26 AM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


I always knew that someday, I'd run into other vision scientists on Mefi. I just didn't expect there to be so many!

I study covert spatial attention (i.e. maintaining fixation, without saccades) so I have little to contribute here. But a conference meetup could be fun.
posted by graticule at 7:40 PM on July 4, 2018 [4 favorites]


The Strange Brain of the World's Greatest Solo Climber - "Alex Honnold doesn't experience fear like the rest of us."
posted by kliuless at 4:44 AM on July 7, 2018


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