Retention of Quiet Eye in Older Skilled Basketball Players

Abstract

There is mounting research to suggest that cognitive and motor expertise is more resistant to age-related decline than more general capacities. The authors investigated the retention of skills in medium-aged skilled (n = 14) and older-aged skilled (n = 7) athletes by comparing them with medium-aged less skilled (n = 15) and older-aged less skilled (n = 15) participants. Participants performed basketball free throws and dart throws as a transfer task under standardized conditions. Motor performance (accuracy) and perceptual performance (quiet eye) were examined across the four groups. There were significant differences between skill groups and age groups in throwing accuracy on both throwing tasks. Skilled players outperformed less skilled and medium-aged players outperformed older-aged players in basketball and dart throws. There were no significant differences in quiet eye duration across the skill or age groups in either task. These results indicate expertise in a perceptual motor task such as the basketball free throw can be retained in older athletes and that present models of skill maintenance should be re-evaluated to consider the issue of transfer.

The Role of Quiet Eye Timing and Location in the Basketball Three-Point Shot: A New Research Paradigm

“…The first QE study was carried out in the basketball free throw and found that elite players fixated the hoop early for an average of 972 ms on hits and 806 ms on misses, while their near-elite teammates averaged 400 ms on hits and 250 ms on misses (Vickers, 1996a, b). Subsequent studies have confirmed these results for high and lower skilled athletes, under conditions of anxiety and in QE training studies where novices are taught the QE characteristics of experts (Vickers, 1996a, b; Harle and Vickers, 2001; Wilson et al, 2009; Rienhoff et al, 2013; Fischer et al, 2015; Klostermann et al, 2017). A number of perceptual/cognitive and/or neural models have been proposed to explain these findings, for example, attention control theory (Eysenck et al, 2007; Wilson et al, 2009; Causer et al, 2011), ventral and dorsal processing (Vickers, 2012; Vickers and Willams, 2017), the inhibition hypothesis (Klostermann et al, 2014; Klostermann, 2019), and EEG/QE/ocular activity (Janelle et al, 2000a, b; Mann et al, 2011; Muraskin et al, 2016; Gallicchio et al, 2018).…”

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“…These results are confirmed by , who chose to use ETG by ASL (at 29,97Hz), mentioning that in all conditions that precede jump shots, players stare at the target during a long enough period in order to reach success and that the efficiency of shooting depends on the duration and frequency of those fixations. Fischer et al (2015), who used ETG BY Arrington Research (at 30Hz), concluded that in perception motor tasks, such as in free throw, the level of expertise is maintained in older athletes, this due to the lack of significant differences, in this study, in the duration of QE between shootings or age groups in the analyzed tasks.…”

“…relationship between QE, anxiety and focus of attention Vine & Wilson, 2011;Wilson, 2010;; 2. occlusion of vision (de Oliveira, Huys, Oudejans, van De Langenberg, & Beek, 2007;de Oliveira, Oudejans, & Beek, 2006;Oudejans, Heubers, Ruitenbeek, & Janssen, 2012); 3. QE in jump shot and/or in free throw (de Oliveira et al, 2008;Fischer et al, 2015;Steciuk & Zwierko, 2015;Zwierko, Popowczak, Wozniak, & Rokita, 2016); 4. QE and jump shot with or without defense (Klostermann, Panchuk, & Farrow, 2017); 5. actions that precede the shooting (Oudejans, Karamat, & Stolk, 2012).…”

Quiet Eye: The next generation – comment on Vickers

“…Surprisingly, little has been done in the maintenance of QE as athletes' age. In a series of studies, Rienhoff et al (2013) and Fischer et al, (2015) demonstrated that the role of QE in two different expertise groups and three different age groups might vary. In contrast to younger experts, showing the expected pattern of results, master athletes lose the QE and have shorter durations compared to novices in the same age group while still showing superior results.…”