Concentration in archers and shooters: Chauhan 2026

The study compares the concentration ability reported by 14 archers and 14 shooters at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, India, all aged 18 to 25, with at least two years of competitive experience and appearances in inter-college events. The measure is the concentration section of a mental skills questionnaire.

The shooters averaged 14.14 points and the archers 9.71, with t = 2.41 on 26 degrees of freedom, above the threshold of 2.056 the authors give. The spread of scores was very different between the two groups: a standard deviation of 6.12 among the shooters and 3.13 among the archers. The authors put the difference down to shooting being done indoors, in stable conditions and with almost no movement, while archery is often practised outdoors, with changing wind and light, and conclude that archers need more concentration training.

Participants were chosen deliberately, not at random, from among the university's athletes. Concentration is measured with a self-report questionnaire, the Mental Skills Questionnaire attributed to Hardy and Nelson (1996); the paper does not say how many items the concentration section has, what response scale is used or which direction the score runs, and it reports no reliability in this sample. The analysis is a single independent-samples t-test. The participants' sex, the type of bow, the shooting discipline (rifle or pistol), the level reached and the moment the questionnaire was filled in are not given.

Fourteen people per group, chosen by the authors at a single university, represent neither archers nor shooters: the difference may depend on who was involved. The questionnaire measures how concentrated people judge themselves to be, not concentration during shooting, and no performance was recorded. The explanations offered (wind, light, outdoor setting) were not measured and remain the authors' conjectures; the recommendation to train concentration in archers does not follow from the data either.

With variances this different, the version of the test that allows for them brings the difference close to the threshold (p about 0.026 against 0.023), so the result holds but with little margin. The introduction quotes figures with no clear support, such as performance being 80% down to psychological factors or concentration improving by 289.2%. The journal has questionable editorial standards.

For anyone who shoots, the study changes little. It says that in a small Indian university group the archers rated themselves less concentrated than the shooters; it does not say they were less concentrated on the shooting line, or that this affected their scores. That outdoor archery tests attention more than an indoor range is plausible, but here it is a conjecture, not a finding. In the registry it counts as a weak comparison between two precision sports on a self-report measure.