Speaker
Description
Many sports require athletes to dynamically control their visual attention to achieve optimal performance, especially when under time-pressure. In this real-world eye-tracking study, we uncover the interplay between attention and performance in 11 Modern Pentathlon elite athletes of the Italian National Team during "Laser Run", which involves five blocks of shootings, each consisting of four series. In each series, athletes must score five valid shots and after that, in real competitions, they perform a run, which forces them to trade-off accuracy (how well they hit the target) and time (how fast they shoot). Fixations acquired with a Tobii Pro Glasses 2 were time-locked to each critical shoot (when the trigger was pulled) and considered only if occurring within a single or spanning across multiple shoots. We found that higher accuracy and longer fixations increase the time to complete a shoot. However, athletes learn to dynamically adjust this trade-off between attention and accuracy across the shooting blocks, so significantly reducing their overall timings too. Our results challenge the belief that fixation duration prior to a critical movement is predictive of performance (e.g., the quiet eye concept) and posit that attention needs to dynamically accommodate motor-actions in time-limited sport activities.
| If you're submitting a poster, would you be interested in giving a blitz talk? | Yes |
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