Quiet eye in young archers: Söğüt 2025 study

The study used electrooculography to measure quiet eye duration, the last steady fixation of gaze before the release, in 18 young Turkish archers (9 girls and 9 boys), and tried to predict it from 14 individual characteristics: age, sex, height, weight, years of training, leg length, shooting scores, two reach measures labelled composite reach distance, and a body awareness score. Mean quiet eye was 0.81 seconds in the horizontal recording, 0.59 for the right eye and 0.71 for the left, with individual values from 0.2 to almost 2 seconds.

For the prediction the authors used two penalised regressions, Ridge and Lasso, and report R² between 0.80 and 0.94 depending on the measure and the method. On their reading of the coefficient plots, left reach distance matters for predicting horizontal quiet eye, right leg length for the right eye and the body awareness score for the left eye. The coefficients are not given as numbers. Shooting scores enter the model only as one of the variables used to predict quiet eye, and the study does not check whether a longer quiet eye goes with a higher score.

The archers, who had at least two years of regular training according to the inclusion criteria, shot 18 arrows in three ends of six, from distances between 30 and 50 metres, with misses scored as zero. During shooting a Biopac MP100 system with an EOG100C amplifier recorded horizontal and vertical eye movements at 200 Hz, separately for the right and left eye. Quiet eye is defined as the interval before the release during which the signal stayed within 3 degrees: an observer marked its end at the sound of the arrow leaving the bow, and its start was traced backwards. Each recording (horizontal, right eye, left eye) has its own score, with maxima between 55 and 58, which suggests one end of six arrows for each.

For the analysis the data were split 80% for training the model and 20% for testing. To make up for the small sample the authors added synthetic data, made by copying real cases with a little random noise on the variables and on the outcome. From the R² values they then calculated Cohen's f² and a statistical power of 1.

Eighteen archers and 14 variables make any model fragile, and the synthetic data add no information: they are near-copies of the real cases. The paper does not make clear whether they were generated before or after the split into training and test sets; if before, the model was tested on cases very similar to ones it had already seen, and R² values above 0.80 should be read as optimistic. The power of 1, derived from those same R² values, says nothing about whether the sample is adequate.

Some figures do not add up. The stated mean age is 17.33 with a standard deviation of 1.44, but the same table gives a minimum of 10, a median of 14 and a maximum of 19, which cannot produce that mean; years of training have a minimum of zero despite the two-year criterion. The body awareness score and the test behind the reach distances are not described. Electrooculography is less precise than an eye tracker, as the authors acknowledge, and the discipline (recurve or compound) is not stated. Finally, quiet eye is treated only as something to predict: the score appears among the predictors, but no analysis says whether a longer quiet eye goes with better shooting.

For an archer the study changes nothing concrete. It gives an order of magnitude for quiet eye measured by electrooculography in young archers, around three quarters of a second with large differences from one person to the next, and it is one of the few papers to take this tool, cheaper and more portable than an eye tracker, onto the shooting range.

The predictive part does not show that reach distance, leg length or body awareness lengthen quiet eye: it is an association inside a model built on 18 people, padded out with synthetic data and with no published coefficients. For a coach working on quiet eye, the underlying question remains open, namely whether a longer quiet eye brings more points, and this study does not address it.