The quiet eye is the final stable fixation of the gaze before the release: in archery, the stretch during which the eye stays still on the point being aimed at, usually the centre of the target, until the arrow leaves. The term comes from research on gaze in other precision sports, where it has become one of the most studied indicators, whereas in archers the measurements are few and come from a handful of research groups.
Only one study puts the quiet eye next to archers' accuracy, a British one from 2017: in Olympic-level archers the fixation lasted almost two seconds, in club archers less than one, and with the two groups pooled, longer durations went with smaller errors. In the registry, the claim that a longer quiet eye improves accuracy is therefore reported, with one clear limit: the comparison is between levels, not between the arrows of the same archer. The rest of the data on archers adds three things: duration varies so much from one archer to another that there is no reference value to chase; in a computer task, when aiming gets harder, only the experts lengthen it; and since 2025 it can be extracted automatically from the electrical signal of the eyes. Quiet eye training, on the other hand, has not yet been put to the test in archers.
What the quiet eye is
The word "stable" has a technical meaning here, because the eye is never completely still: even while fixating it makes small, continuous movements. In research a fixation counts as stable when the gaze stays inside a narrow window for at least 100 milliseconds. In the British study the window was one degree, half a degree either side of the target centre; in the Turkish studies of 2025 it was three degrees. For a sense of scale, at 30 metres the 80 cm target face takes up about one and a half degrees.
The most useful detail for an archer is where the difference between experts and less experienced archers lies. In the British study the end of the fixation did not differ between the two groups, while the start came earlier in the Olympic-level archers, in whom the quiet eye took up 29.4% of the shot time against 18.1% in the club archers. The expert, in other words, settles the gaze sooner and holds it through the whole final part of the aim, right up to the release.
The link with accuracy
In the 2017 study, ten Olympic-level archers from the British team and ten archers from a university club, with about two years of shooting behind them, shot 24 arrows at 30 metres with electrodes around their eyes. The quiet eye averaged 1.96 seconds in the first group and 0.76 in the second, and when the link was calculated across all twenty archers, longer durations went with smaller errors. The Olympic-level archers, however, were also the more accurate, so that correlation largely says the same thing as skill level: people who have shot for years have a steadier gaze and also put their arrows closer to the centre. Whether, within the same archer, the arrows with a longer quiet eye land closer to the centre has not yet been checked in studies of archers.
The same study adds a finding that calls for caution. In a computer aiming task with a joystick, both groups of archers made smaller errors than people who had never shot, but there was no difference in accuracy between the two groups, even though under the heavier noise the Olympic-level archers held their gaze still for longer: in the registry, the claim that archers aim better even without a bow is reported on the strength of this very study. Between the two groups of archers, at least in that task, the experts' longer gaze did not translate into more accurate aiming; with all thirty participants pooled, non-archers included, longer durations still went with smaller errors, the same tangle of gaze and skill level seen on the range.
How long it should last: there is no reference figure
It is the question everyone asks, and the studies on archers do not give a right value. In a Turkish study from 2025, eighteen young archers, nine girls and nine boys aged about 17 with at least two years of practice, shot 18 arrows each at between 30 and 50 metres, with the quiet eye measured by electro-oculography. On the horizontal channel the mean was 0.81 seconds, but from the shortest to the longest it ran from 0.22 to 1.94, almost nine times as long. In the models the authors built to predict it, sex was dropped, along with weight or height depending on the measure: in the registry, the claim that duration varies widely between archers and sex, weight and height do not explain it is reported. The finding is fragile, as it rests on eighteen people and fourteen variables, with the data padded out with synthetic copies, but the spread of durations is descriptive, and on its own it shows how little an average says about an individual archer.
There is a second reason not to fix on a number. The two studies used different windows, one degree in the British study and three in the Turkish one, and a wider window counts as still a gaze that a narrower one would reject: the 1.96 seconds of the British Olympic archers and the 0.81 of the young Turkish archers cannot be set side by side, even leaving skill level aside. A duration read in an article or heard at the range is therefore not a target. What makes sense is to compare an archer with themselves, always measured the same way.
In my own work I look not only at the average duration but also at how much it changes from one arrow to the next, because a fixation that is long on one arrow and short on the following one usually tells me something about the pre-shot routine. That is my own choice of method: the studies have measured average duration, and how much the consistency of the quiet eye weighs on archers' scores has not been studied.
When aiming gets harder
The 2017 British study also tried making the aim harder. Ten Olympic-level archers, ten club archers and ten people who had never shot aimed with a joystick at a target on a screen, with random noise added to the sight at two intensities. Under heavy noise the experts lengthened their quiet eye from 2.6 to 3.3 seconds on average, starting it earlier; the club archers actually went the other way, from 2.3 to 2.0, and the non-archers stayed at 1.2 in both conditions. Across the three groups the noise worsened accuracy and lengthened the time before the shot, so the experts' longer gaze is not just the by-product of slower aiming. In the registry, the claim that when aiming gets harder only experienced archers lengthen the quiet eye is reported, with limits that weigh heavily: the task is not archery, participants aimed with their chin on a rest, and the response came after 16 to 20 seconds, about three times the 6.3 seconds the same experts took on the range from full draw to release.
A Korean study from 2019 looked at gaze under distraction: seven national team archers and seven university archers watched a film of the shot recorded from the archer's point of view. When a distractor appeared during the aim, a beep or some coloured circles around the sight, the national archers held longer fixations, about 2.4 seconds against 1.8, while the university archers made more fixations and more saccades. In the registry, the claim that expert archers keep their gaze steadier than less experienced archers, even when distracted is reported, but here too the archers sat in front of a screen, without a bow, and the distractor test had no distraction-free aim to compare against: the study shows that the national archers' gaze is steadier under distraction, not that distraction changes it. The idea that the expert's gaze adapts to difficulty therefore rests on the British computer task alone, and that is already a reason not to chase a fixed duration.
Why a steady gaze might help
Nobody disputes that the quiet eye exists, since it can be measured. What remains open is whether it is a cause of good aiming or simply the mark of someone who has shot for years, and the studies on archers are not enough to settle it. The explanations put forward in precision sports come down mainly to three, and they should be read as hypotheses.
The first is that during the final fixation the nervous system prepares the release, and that the more time it has, the more consistently the movement comes out. EEG studies in archery point partly this way: during the aim the brain of elite archers works in a more coordinated way than that of lower-level archers, a reported finding, whereas whether brain activity differs before the best arrows is contested, because the studies point in opposite directions. None of the archery studies cited here, however, has recorded EEG and the quiet eye together.
The second is that a steady gaze on a relevant point helps keep distractions out, from crowd noise to the wind. The closest data are the Korean findings on distractors, which however measure gaze in front of a film and do not link it to the score. The third is that a steady gaze goes with a steadier head and torso: it is plausible, but it has not been measured in archers.
How an archer's gaze is measured
Every figure on archers' quiet eye in this article comes from electro-oculography, which reads the electrical potential of the eye through electrodes on the skin around the eyes. The British group chose it because, in trials with a portable eye tracker, some archers closed or narrowed one eye and the data were lost, a problem that anyone who has watched people shoot with one eye half shut will grasp straight away.
Until recently, though, the start and end of the quiet eye on the trace were marked by hand by an expert, which is slow and subjective work. In 2025 a group at the University of Mersin recorded ten club archers, six arrows each, and trained neural networks to reproduce the expert's annotations on the sixty stretches of signal: the best two manage it with an accuracy of about 93% and 92%, and in the best conditions they miss the start of the fixation by 7 to 9 milliseconds. The result depends on how clean the signal is, since on the raw trace the best network drops to 84%. In the registry, the claim that the quiet eye can be measured automatically from the electrical signal of the eyes is reported: it is a single methods study, on ten archers from one club whose discipline and level the paper does not give, and the reference is one expert's annotation, not video measurement. For coaches it is still useful news, because electro-oculography costs far less than an eye tracker.
Without instruments, what you measure is something else. With a video recording or a stopwatch you can time the interval from full draw to release, which is the aiming time, and it is a useful figure for seeing how consistently the sequence repeats from one arrow to the next. The quiet eye, however, plays out within a window of one or three degrees, and a camera pointed at the face cannot tell whether the eye stays inside it. In my work I keep the two apart: I always time the aim, and I measure the quiet eye only when the instrument is there.
The rest of vision
Visual work in archery covers much more than the quiet eye, and here the studies on archers point in a less obvious direction than many expect. In a large American study from 1986 of 102 recurve archers, from beginners to an Olympic champion, none of the eleven measures of acuity, phorias and colour vision was linked to score: in the registry, the claim that visual acuity is not linked to an archer's score is reported, and the only visual measure linked to score in that study was depth perception, which is a different ability. In 2010, in South Africa, 28 archers from three styles were compared with norms for elite athletes from other sports, and on acuity, contrast sensitivity and stereopsis they came out lower: the claim that archers do not have better visual skills than other athletes is reported too. As for acuity, among archers with normal vision exceptional eyesight does not seem to be what sets the better ones apart.
Seeing well does matter, though. Of 57 recurve and compound archers examined at an eye hospital, about 13%, one in eight, had an uncorrected refractive error (the claim is reported), and at 30 metres the centre of the target is a small detail. That is why, before working on the gaze, it makes sense to have your eyes checked by an ophthalmologist or an optometrist: if the centre looks blurred, the problem comes before the fixation.
On eye dominance the data change direction depending on who is shooting. Among complete beginners shooting without a sight, those whose dominant eye and hand were on the same side scored more; among trained archers the advantage disappears, and the authors think the sight cancels it out. In the registry, the claim that cross-dominance worsens accuracy is contested, as is the claim that aiming with one eye closed gives tighter groups: of the only two studies, the more robust one, on fourteen archers, finds no difference in score between the two conditions. The ability to anticipate the arrival of a moving stimulus, measured with a laboratory device in the same 1986 American study, showed no clear link with score either (the claim is reported), and the authors explain this by the fact that in archery the target does not move. Exercises for convergence, dynamic vision or saccades, finally, have not been put to the test in archers.
How I work on the gaze
Since quiet eye training has not been put to the test in archers, what follows is my own way of working, not a validated protocol. It moves in phases, and the order matters more than how long each one lasts.
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Eyesight and starting point
First an eye check, then a set of measurements over a good number of arrows without changing anything: the quiet eye if the instrument is available, otherwise at least the aiming time, and how much each varies from one arrow to the next.
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Work within the shot
The archer looks for a still fixation on the centre of the target in the final part of the aim, up to the release, with an external focus of attention, in short and frequent sessions. There is no duration to reach: the reference is the archer's own starting point.
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Back to normal shooting
The archer returns to the usual sessions while measuring continues, to see whether what has changed holds up when attention goes elsewhere.
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Measure again
The measurements from the first phase are repeated, with the same instrument and the same rules, and the archer is compared with themselves before deciding whether to continue or change course.
The mistakes I see most often all sit outside this sequence. The first is doing eye exercises at home in front of a screen, detached from shooting: nobody has shown in archers that they carry over to the shooting line, and the quiet eye in the studies is measured on the target. The second is looking only at the average, which can stay the same while individual arrows vary a great deal. The third is skipping the eye check and finding out months later that the problem lay there.
Beyond the quiet eye
Work on the gaze does not act on its own, either. A long quiet eye on a body that sways still gives an aim that moves, because the eyes stay still but the torso does not, and posture needs looking at first; with a shaking bow arm it still gives tremor in the sight; without a consistent routine the timing of the sequence changes from one arrow to the next, and the gaze changes with it.
That is why, in my work, the quiet eye is one of the things I look at once posture and technique are solid, and I treat it as a measurement of the archer rather than a goal: it shows when the gaze settles and for how long, and the comparison that matters is with that archer's own earlier arrows.