Reactive stress in young archers: Pahan 2022 study

One hundred and eighty boys aged 11 to 13, all with at least two years of training in a state sports programme in Jharkhand, India, took the determination test of the Vienna Test System: 30 from each of six individual non-contact sports, namely archery, athletics, cycling, shooting, swimming and weightlifting. The test measures how well and how quickly a person responds to a rapid series of visual and auditory stimuli, each with its own key or pedal.

There were no differences between sports in correct responses (p = 0.666), missed stimuli (p = 0.131) or median reaction time (p = 0.095; 0.84 seconds on average for the archers). Only incorrect responses differed (p < 0.001): the mean percentile rank was 40.16 for archery, 37.66 for shooting, 32.66 for weightlifting, 31.7 for cycling, 23.1 for athletics and 15.86 for swimming, and the pairwise comparisons separate swimming from cycling (p = 0.012), archery (p = 0.001), shooting (p < 0.001) and weightlifting (p = 0.029). The authors infer that in sports where the athlete stays still, such as target shooting, more errors are made and the risk of breaking down under pressure is greater.

The boys were chosen by random sampling stratified by sport within a single academy, which ran the same age-appropriate daily programme for all of them; girls were excluded. The test (form S1) takes about six minutes: coloured circles, rectangles and high or low tones appear, and each has an assigned response, a coloured key, one of two hand levers or one of two pedals. The pace is set by the machine, so the pressure comes from the speed of the task, not from a competitive situation.

For each boy the percentile ranks of correct, incorrect and missed responses and the median reaction time were recorded. Testing took place between 9 am and 5 pm, after a practice run, and the boys received an incentive at the end. Since many distributions were not normal, the sports were compared with the Kruskal-Wallis test and, for incorrect responses, with pairwise Mann-Whitney tests.

How the main result should be read depends on a detail the paper leaves unclear: which way the percentile rank for incorrect responses runs. The authors treat a high value as meaning more errors. In the Vienna Test System norms, however, percentile ranks are usually oriented to performance, so that a high value means a better result than the reference sample; if that holds here, the archers made fewer errors than the swimmers, the opposite of what the paper argues. The fact that every group sits well below 50 on both correct and incorrect responses also suggests children being compared with adult norms.

Either way, the test measures responses to fast stimuli in a laboratory, not behaviour in competition: the explanations based on choking, on the shooter standing still or on momentum were built after seeing the data, and the authors themselves write that they are unproven. These were boys at the start of their development who, according to the authors, mostly did general physical training, so any difference may reflect who gets steered into a sport more than the sport itself. No effect sizes are given, and the type of bow the archers used is not stated.

For an archer or a youth coach the study offers modest information: on a multiple-stimulus reaction test, 11 to 13-year-olds who did archery were as fast and accurate as boys of the same age in five other sports, and differed only in the number of errors, in a direction the paper does not allow anyone to establish with confidence. The authors' conclusion that archers are more prone to breaking down under pressure and need cognitive training does not follow from the data: nobody was observed in competition. Finding out how archers respond to pressure needs studies that measure shooting in competition.