Good shots and perceived target size: Lee 2012

The study asks whether an archer, straight after shooting and without seeing where the arrow went, perceives the target as larger when the shot went better. In the first experiment nine Korean competitive archers aged 16 and 17 shot 25 arrows at 50 metres at targets of five diameters, from 60 to 100 cm, in random order. After each release they turned their head and a screen hid the target; they then picked, from a card with 18 miniature targets of 10 to 27 mm, the one that looked most like the target they had just shot at.

The chosen miniatures grew with the real target and were always larger than its equivalent size: on average from 15.44 mm for the 60 cm target to 24.07 mm for the 100 cm one, against an equivalent of 12 to 20 mm. The mean score per arrow rose with diameter, from 7.7 to 8.93. In an analysis with both measures together, only perceived size remained linked to score, not real size; the correlation between score and perceived size across the 45 means (five per archer) was 0.54. The four archers with the highest averages chose larger miniatures than the four with the lowest, 20.50 against 18.46 mm.

In the second experiment 20 boys who had never shot simply aimed, with no arrow and no release, once standing freely and once with the bow arm resting on a tripod support. With the support they chose slightly larger miniatures: 19.45 against 18.70 mm, with the largest difference on the smallest target (1.57 mm).

The archers in the first experiment were students at a South Korean sports high school and shot with their own competition bows and arrows suited to each of them; the paper does not say what type of bow. The targets measured 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 cm, chosen from the range used in competition, scored from 10 to 1, and each shot was allowed 30 seconds. The miniatures were laid out in a different order every time; five of them (12, 14, 16, 18 and 20 mm) matched the visual angle of the real targets at 50 metres. The instruction was deliberately vague: pick the figure that looks most like the target. There were ten familiarisation shots beforehand, and each archer took about half an hour.

In the second experiment the boys used a 168 cm competition bow and went through stance, draw and aim in front of the same targets, twice per diameter in each condition; half started with the support and half without, and they were not told there would be a second condition. The support was a tripod with an arm cuff, adjusted so that the bow arm stayed horizontal: the authors call it a stabiliser, but it is not the stabiliser fitted to a bow.

There are nine archers, all male and from the same school, and the 45 means used to calculate the link with score come five from each of them: treating them as independent observations gives the result more weight than it has. The comparison between better and weaker archers sets four against four, with averages from 7.3 to 9.1 points. With five arrows per diameter, the mean in each cell is fragile too.

The central idea, that archers sense the quality of their own shot through the body and that this sensation shows up as a target that looks larger, is the authors' interpretation. In the first experiment the shot itself is not measured: all we see is that larger miniatures go with higher scores. The second experiment supports it only indirectly, with people who cannot shoot, no arrow, a support that does not exist in real shooting, and an effect of about three quarters of a millimetre on the miniature. The authors themselves allow that participants may have responded partly to what they thought was expected of them, though they find it hard to see why that would apply more to the better archers.

For archers the study describes something many know from experience: on good days the middle looks bigger. Here the impression appears shot by shot, before knowing where the arrow landed, as if the body had already registered how the shot went. This fits with the idea that an experienced archer has information about the shot just made even without looking at the target.

No exercise follows from it: the study does not show that trying to see the target as larger improves shooting, since perception was measured after the shot and the observed link says nothing about the reverse path, nor that the target is literally seen as larger. In the registry it counts as one of the few perception experiments carried out with competitive archers shooting arrows at a real target, even if they were few and young.