Attention networks in archers and shooters: Lu 2021

The study compared 62 athletes from the Chinese national shooting and archery team (37 shooters and 25 archers) with 49 athletes from the Hebei provincial team, using the Attention Network Test, a computer task that estimates three components of attention: alerting, spatial orienting and control of interference. The national team athletes responded 28.84 ms faster on average (508.44 against 537.28 ms), with the same accuracy (0.97 and 0.98). The time difference was similar across all conditions of the task, so the three network effects, which are calculated as differences between conditions, did not differ between the groups: the interactions of group with cue type (p = 0.865) and of group with flanker type (p = 0.289) were not significant.

The 62 national team athletes then followed a mindfulness programme lasting 5 to 8 weeks and repeated the test. Mean response time did not change significantly (from 508.44 to 501.10 ms, p = 0.116); only responses after the spatial cue (10.02 ms, p = 0.018) and those with conflicting flankers (12.01 ms, p = 0.019) became faster. Taken on their own, the 25 archers did not become significantly faster in any condition (mean response time went from 510.27 to 508.65 ms); what did shrink was the gap between conflicting and matching flankers, from 89.04 to 78.52 ms (interaction p = 0.024), although neither condition on its own changed significantly. The faster responses come mainly from the shooters.

The athletes were aged 14 to 40; those in the national team were older on average (23.66 against 19.53 years), and the authors write that the results hold after controlling for age. In the task an arrow appears above or below a fixation point, flanked by two arrows on each side pointing either the same way or the opposite way, and the participant clicks to show which way the central one points. Before the arrows there may be no cue, an asterisk in the centre warning that the stimulus is about to appear, or an asterisk where it will appear. The alerting effect is the time difference between no cue and the central cue, orienting the difference between the central and the spatial cue, and conflict the difference between incongruent and congruent flankers. After 12 practice trials there were 192 trials in two blocks.

The mindfulness training, adapted from the MBSR and MBCT programmes (body scan, attention to the breath and to other sensations), was led by a professional coach once a week for an hour and a half, with 15 minutes of guided practice at home each day. Only the national team did it, as part of the team's psychology service; the provincial team was not retested and there was no control group. Shooters and archers were analysed together, after t tests showed no difference between them at the first test, and then separately in a supplementary analysis.

The comparison between national and provincial teams shows athletes who were faster overall, not three more efficient attention networks as the authors put it: since the interactions are not significant, the difference applies equally to every condition. In a cross-sectional design, moreover, there is no telling whether it reflects level of performance, age, selection or something else. The paper does not say how many archers were in the provincial team.

For the mindfulness part there is no control group: a gain of 10 to 12 milliseconds in two of the five conditions, on the second run of the same test, could equally come from familiarity with the task. The programme lasted anywhere from 5 to 8 weeks, home practice is not documented, and in the archers taken alone only the gap between the two flanker conditions narrowed, with no single condition changing significantly. No shooting measure was collected, neither score nor aiming: the link between these computer tasks and what happens on the shooting line remains the authors' hypothesis, and they also suggest using the test to select athletes without having checked whether it predicts anything.

For an archer the study carries two messages of different weight. The first is that in the Chinese national team, shooters and archers responded to a general attention test about three hundredths of a second faster than a provincial team, with the same number of errors. That is a difference between groups, and it says neither whether training attention helps anyone move up a level nor how any individual archer behaves.

The second concerns mindfulness: some responses became slightly faster after the programme in the shooters, but not in the archers, although in the archers the gap between trials with matching and conflicting flankers narrowed a little. Anyone who practises mindfulness or offers it to a team will not find evidence here that it improves archers' attention, or their scores, which were not measured; what they will find is a description of a workable programme for a team (one guided session a week and a quarter of an hour a day), to set against other studies on the same subject.