Visual Scanning Behavior and Attention Strategies for Shooting Among Expert Versus Collegiate Korean Archers

Abstract

This study analyzed differences in visual scanning behavior and resistance to distractions between Olympic and collegiate archers. The experiment required the participants to watch a test film comprising six stages corresponding to the phases of an archery performance. The recording emulated the archer's point of view. During initial phases of shooting, Olympic archers demonstrated more frequent and longer fixations than did their collegiate counterparts, whereas during the later phases of shooting, the groups' visual scanning patterns did not differ significantly. In a second experiment within this study, auditory and visual distractors led Olympic archers to exhibit fewer fixations of longer duration and less eye movement, regardless of the type of distraction. Thus, in each experiment, Korean national-team archers modified their attentional strategies more efficiently than collegiate archers, expanding and narrowing their focused attention based on task demands. These findings provide fundamental information on the nature of expert shooters' visual scanning patterns and have implications for developing training protocols for aspiring athletes.

Stereopsis in Sports: Visual Skills and Visuomotor Integration Models in Professional and Non-Professional Athletes

“…When focusing on body movement, expert golfers base their motor control on proprioceptive and vestibular signals rather than visual inputs, which they instead integrate in the swing motor programming. Similarly, Kim et al (2019) [ 26 ] analysed the differences in shooting behaviour of Olympic vs. collegiate archers. Olympic athletes were able to exclude any type of confounding factors during the shot and visual parameters such as fixation or eye movements were optimised as compared to collegiate archers.…”

“…However, a specific vision training method has been proposed to improve putting or shooting skills in both golf and archery. Overall, it appears that in putting/shooting sport actions, non-professional athletes base their gesture programming mainly on stereoptic inputs, which, however, should be—with experience—progressively integrated by attentional, proprioceptive, and vestibular inputs [ 22 , 26 ].…”

What Makes an Elite Shooter and Archer? The Critical Role of Interoceptive Attention

“…The roles of attentional modulation across perceptual inputs and executive control of attention have been discussed in different sports [for a review, see Memmert ( 2009 )]. In shooting and archery sports, the roles of arousal, vigilance, orienting, and conflict control have been stressed (Bertollo et al, 2012 ; Kim et al, 2019 ; Lu et al, 2021 ). However, the fact that many athletes of shooting and archery are actually shortsighted reminds us that there may also be some other attention ability that contributes to the success in shooting and archery.…”

Automatic detection of peripheral stimuli in shooters and handball players: an event-related potential study

“…Di Russo et al ( 2003 ) reported shorter saccadic latency, and more stable fixation in the presence of distractors in elite shooters. Kim et al ( 2019 ) compared the scanning strategy of archers of the Korean national team with collegiate archers in a procedure with emulating the actual archery situation. In the earlier phase of shooting fixation, duration of the elite archers was longer, and the number of saccades was reduced in comparison to the less experienced archers.…”