Archers' concentration: Komarudin 2020 study

Twenty archers from a university archery club in Indonesia were split at random into two groups of ten and given four weeks of mental training of two kinds: one group worked on the NeuroTracker, a programme in which the eyes follow several targets moving in three dimensions on a screen; the other carried on with the club's usual exercises. Concentration was measured before and after with the Concentration Grid Test.

The NeuroTracker group went from a mean of 11.2 to 19.7 points, a gain of 8.5; the usual-training group from 11.1 to 15.6, a gain of 4.5. Within each group the improvement was significant (t = -21.177 and t = -9.429), and comparing the two gains gave t = 6.414 in favour of the NeuroTracker. The authors conclude that the NeuroTracker works better than traditional methods and recommend it to coaches.

The participants were 20 of the 40 members of the archery club at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, 14 men and 6 women aged 19 to 21, chosen because they could already shoot and had competed; only then were they allocated to the groups at random. The experimental group had 12 sessions over four weeks, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, each archer alone in a quiet, dimly lit room, sitting in 3D glasses 1.33 metres from a 50-inch 3D television. Each session was one core session of 20 trials lasting 8 seconds: four targets light up, move among the others and must be picked out at the end; after a correct answer the speed goes up, after a mistake it goes down. The control group did the usual training: warm-up, shadow shooting without a bow, concentration on a candle flame and on the second hand of a clock, meditation, imagery and shooting at 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 metres.

The Concentration Grid Test is a pen-and-paper task timed with a stopwatch; in its classic form it asks the person to find scattered numbers on a grid in sequence. The authors report a test-retest reliability of r = 0.79. The comparisons are t tests: paired within each group, and independent samples for the gains of the two groups.

Ten archers per group is a small number, and the sample was not drawn at random: only the allocation to groups was. The paper gives no standard deviations (the figure that is supposed to show them carries only the means), does not explain how the test is scored or how much time was allowed, and does not say whether the person giving it knew which group each archer belonged to. The comparison is also uneven: the experimental group received something new, individual and technological, while the controls carried on with their usual group routine, and novelty alone can account for part of the difference.

There is also a gap between what was trained and what was measured: following moving targets and searching for numbers on a grid are both visual tasks done at a desk, whereas concentration while shooting was not measured. The method states that shooting data were collected as well, but this paper does not report them: they appear in a second paper by the same authors on the same twenty archers, which the registry counts together with this one as a single sample. The closing recommendation to switch to the NeuroTracker goes beyond what a four-week comparison of twenty people can support.

On what matters to an archer the study says little: this paper does not report whether four weeks of NeuroTracker led to better aiming, decisions or shooting. It shows that in a small group of university students the score on a pen-and-paper concentration test rose more with the NeuroTracker than with the candle, the clock hand and meditation; but it also rose considerably with those, and the two groups started from almost identical values.

For anyone weighing up buying the system, this result alone does not justify the cost: the improvement concerns a test close to the trained task, the programme was short and nobody knows whether the effect lasts. For the same reason the study does not show that the traditional exercises are useless. The shooting scores of the same archers are discussed in the record for the companion paper.