Archers with greater body awareness have a longer quiet eye

The summary today

No study yet says whether people who are more aware of their bodies hold their gaze still for longer. The only nearby data come from a small study with a questionable construction: eighteen young Turkish archers, nine girls and nine boys with an average age of 17 and at least two years of training, shot from 30 to 50 metres while electrooculography recorded how long the eye stayed still before release, 0.71 seconds on average for the left eye. The authors put fourteen variables, from age to leg length to score, into two penalised regressions, and for the left eye the body awareness score is the one that keeps a high weight in both. The text, though, does not say whether the link is positive or negative, and in the figure the line that might match shares its colour with training duration, so the direction cannot be read: we know the two are linked in that model, not that greater awareness goes with a longer quiet eye. The method weighs on it too: the model was trained on the collected data plus synthetic copies made by adding noise, and a reported fit of 0.93 in eighteen people says more about fitting the data than about a link.

Also phrased as: "body awareness and quiet eye"; "proprioception and gaze while aiming"; "body perception and fixation"; "quiet eye in young archers"

Evidence

• 2025
  Context Archers Published later

  18 Turkish archers with an average age of 17 (9 girls, 9 boys, at least two years of training), quiet eye measured with electrooculography while shooting from 30 to 50 metres: 0.81 seconds on average on the horizontal channel, 0.59 for the right eye and 0.71 for the left. In a Ridge and a Lasso regression with fourteen variables, the body awareness score (91 ± 15.7, from 54 to 115) is the one that keeps a high coefficient in both for the left eye (R² = 0.934 and 0.935), but the text gives no sign and in the figure its colour is shared with training duration: the direction of the link cannot be read. The model is trained on data enlarged with noisy synthetic copies, and there is no simple correlation between the two measures.

  Determinants of Electrooculography Measurements for Quiet Eye Duration in Archers via Penalty Regularizer · Fatma Söğüt, İnci Kesilmiş, Evrim Ersin Kangal, Ülkü Çömelekoğlu

Status history

1. 1990 Not studied No one in the registry's bibliography had yet linked body awareness to quiet eye duration in archers: there was no evidence for or against.
2. 2025 Not studied The first data close to the question arrive, and they are not enough to answer it. Eighteen young Turkish archers, quiet eye measured with electrooculography while shooting, and fourteen variables in two penalised regressions: for the left eye, body awareness is the predictor that holds most steadily with both methods, but the text does not say whether the link is positive or negative, and in the figure its colour is shared with another variable. Without the direction it is evidence neither for nor against, and the model was trained on data enlarged with synthetic copies: the question remains unstudied.

Related

Research lines

• 14 studiesGaze and vision: quiet eye, eye dominance and oculomotor behaviour

Other claims in this domain

• ReportedA larger working memory does not make an archer more accurate3 studies · 79 archers measuredStatus since 2012
• ReportedA longer quiet eye improves shooting accuracy3 studies · 58 archers measuredStatus since 2017
• ReportedA mental profile tells archers apart from athletes in other sports only in part5 studies · 550 archers measuredStatus since 2018
• ReportedA mental training programme improves the elite archer's mood1 study · 16 archers measuredStatus since 2023
• ReportedA mental training programme reduces burnout in elite archers1 study · 16 archers measuredStatus since 2023

See all claims on mind and attention