Quiet eye duration varies widely between archers, and sex, weight and height do not explain it

The summary today

That the quiet eye changes with level has been known since 2017: on the field the British team archers held their gaze still for 1.9 seconds, the club archers for 0.7. That it also varies a great deal among archers in the same group is shown by a Turkish study from 2025 of eighteen young archers with at least two years of practice, measured with electro-oculography: horizontal quiet eye averages 0.81 seconds but runs from 0.22 to 1.94, almost nine times as long from the shortest to the longest. In the models that try to predict it, sex is dropped, along with weight for horizontal quiet eye and height for the right eye, while a single-leg reach balance measure, leg length and a body awareness score remain. The finding is fragile: eighteen people and fourteen variables, data padded with synthetic copies, coefficients not reported as figures and some sample data that do not add up. The same group also warns that electro-oculographic measurement depends on how the signal is cleaned.

Also phrased as: "quiet eye duration"; "how long the quiet eye should last"; "individual differences in gaze"; "quiet eye and body awareness"

Evidence

• 2017
  Context Archers Published later

  On the field, 24 arrows at 30 metres: 10 British team archers have a quiet eye of 1.9 s against 0.7 in the 10 club archers (p = 0.012), 29.4 against 18.1 per cent of the shot time. Duration changes with level, but the study does not look at differences within the groups.

  Exploring the quiet eye in archery using field- and laboratory-based tasks · Claudia C. Gonzalez, Joe Causer, Michael J. Grey, Glyn W. Humphreys, R. Chris Miall, A. Mark Williams

• 2025
  For Archers Published later

  18 young Turkish archers (9 girls and 9 boys, at least two years of practice), quiet eye measured with electro-oculography: horizontal 0.81 ± 0.46 s, from 0.22 to 1.94; right eye 0.59 ± 0.39 s, from 0.20 to 1.67; left eye 0.71 ± 0.31 s, from 0.26 to 1.49. Regional journal.

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

• 2025
  For Archers Published later

  In the Lasso regressions the coefficients for sex and weight are set to zero for horizontal quiet eye, and those for sex and height for the right eye, while the models report R squared between 0.80 and 0.94. The analyses run on the original data padded with synthetic data, and the coefficients are not reported as figures.

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

• 2025
  Context Archers Published later

  Among the variables that remain in the models are the left single-leg reach distance (80.32 ± 11.32 cm) for horizontal quiet eye, right leg length for the right eye and a body awareness score (91 ± 15.73, from 54 to 115) for the left eye. Body awareness comes from a questionnaire the paper does not describe.

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

• 2025
  Context Archers Published later

  From the same group, on 10 club archers: the best network recognises the quiet eye with an accuracy of about 0.84 on the raw signal, 0.91 with a single filter and 0.93 with filter and wavelet, and the error on onset falls from 20 to 7 ms. Durations measured with electro-oculography depend on how the signal is cleaned.

  Automated detection of quiet eye durations in archery using electrooculography and comparative deep learning models · Fatma Söğüt, Hüseyin Yanık, Evren Değirmenci, İnci Kesilmiş, Ülkü Çömelekoğlu

Status history

1. 2017 Not studied The first study in the registry to measure archers' quiet eye shows how much it changes with level: on the field the British team archers hold their gaze still for 1.9 seconds, those from a university club for 0.7. It is a comparison between groups, though: nobody looks at how much it varies among archers of the same level, or at what it depends on. On the question itself, no evidence: not studied.
2. 2025 Reported Eighteen young Turkish archers measured with electro-oculography: horizontal quiet eye duration averages around 0.81 seconds but runs from 0.22 to 1.94; the models drop sex, along with weight or height depending on the measure, and keep single-leg reach balance, leg length and a body awareness score. From the same group comes the warning that these figures depend on how the signal is cleaned, because on the raw trace measurement accuracy falls. The models run on data padded with synthetic data and the journal is a regional one, so a single study of this kind goes no further than reported.

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Research lines

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