Eye and hand dominance in shooting: Moreno 2022 review

The review brings together 14 studies, with 2,759 participants in all, on the relationship between dominant hand and dominant eye in sport. There are two profiles: crossed, when the dominant hand and eye are on opposite sides, and uncrossed, when they are on the same side. In the general population the studies cited put crossed profiles at between 10% and 30% (34.8% in the largest meta-analysis), while among high-level athletes in some sports the share rises: 52.55% in golf, 53% in football, 42% in tennis and 50.7% in team sports.

Aiming sports go the other way. Among high-level shooters, 93.1% have an uncrossed profile. For archery the figure comes from a single French study which, according to the review, compared 82 beginners with 1,323 regular archers: the crossed profile made up 34.1% of the beginners and 17.7% of the regular archers according to the table (17.1% in the discussion), and in that study beginners with hand and eye on the same side scored more points than crossed beginners. In biathlon, uncrossed shooters were more accurate; in darts no difference emerged. No study links the profiles to psychological or tactical traits, and most carry a moderate or high risk of bias.

The protocol was registered in advance (INPLASY) and the review follows the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. The authors searched PsycInfo, Scopus, Medline and a theses database, plus the first 100 Google results, with alerts running until December 2020, and accepted only empirical studies in peer-reviewed journals written in English, French or Spanish. Of the 1,297 papers found after removing duplicates, 14 remained, published between 1971 and 2020: eleven cross-sectional, two quasi-experimental without a control group and one prevalence study. Titles and abstracts were screened by a single reviewer; two reviewers then assessed the full texts and extracted the data independently, with a third settling disagreements, and risk of bias was assessed with the Joanna Briggs Institute checklists, without excluding any study.

The synthesis is narrative and set out in tables, with no meta-analysis. The authors also standardised the skill levels (high performance, regular athletes, beginners, non-athletes) and catalogued the tests used. For the eye the most common is the pointing test, in which a finger is lined up with a distant object and one eye is closed at a time; in the archery study the object was at least 2 metres away and the index finger of one hand was used.

For archery the review rests on a single study, and it does not explain where the group of regular archers came from or how they were assessed. That figure appears with slightly different values in different places (82.2% and 82.3% uncrossed, 17.7% and 17.1% crossed), and the abstract attributes it to the highest-performing populations, while the table describes them as regular archers. Most of the advantages are inferred indirectly: a profile is counted as favourable because it is more common among the best athletes, not because anyone measured that it improves shooting. A concentration of uncrossed archers could also come from selection: someone whose dominant eye is on the other side may learn to shoot with the other hand, or give up.

Tests for hand and eye differ from study to study, half of the cross-sectional studies do not measure exposure or outcome validly, and nine of the eleven do not deal with confounding factors. Finally, there is no reliable reference value for the general population, with estimates ranging from 10% to 34.8% crossed, and every comparison depends on that value.

For an archer, the review puts numbers on something coaches already know: among archers and shooters, having hand and eye on the same side is much more common than in the general population, and in one study beginners with this profile scored more points. The explanation the authors offer is mechanical: whoever aims holds the weapon on the side of the eye that is looking. It does not show how much crossed dominance matters for an archer who is already established, or whether changing hands or working with the eye is the better option, because none of the included studies compares them.

For a cross-dominant archer, then, the data do not say that shooting is closed off: they say it is the less common condition among those who shoot well, and that the solutions used in practice, such as closing or covering the dominant eye or shooting with the other hand, were not assessed in these studies. The authors' closing proposal, a shared protocol with a questionnaire for the hand and a test of sighting through a gap between the hands for the eye, would make future studies comparable.