Matteo Campagna
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At equal performance on a visuospatial task, experienced archers activate the frontal attention areas more

1 study · 43 archers measured

ForContextAgainst201220142016201820202022202420262012, for, n = 432012, context, n = 43
Each circle is a study: its position gives the year, its row whether it is for, against or context, its size how many participants it measured. Light circles are studies on other populations or without archers.

There is a single Korean study using functional magnetic resonance imaging: twenty elite female archers, with fifteen years of competition on average and half of them on the national team, against twenty-three women who do not shoot, all doing a visuospatial working memory task. The result on the task does not differ significantly, 47.9 against 40.6 per cent correct (p = 0.29), and neither do the response times; the way of getting there, however, does. The archers activate the middle frontal gyrus, the supplementary motor area and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex more, switch on areas that stay silent in the others, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and the insula, and switch off the precuneus and cingulate, the areas of mental rest, more strongly; there is no area where the non-archers activate more. The finding runs against the most common idea of neural efficiency, in which the expert works with less brain, and it has two limits that matter: no region survives statistical correction across the whole brain, only correction within areas chosen in advance, and the sample is women only. And the task is on a computer, not shooting.

Also phrased as: "the expert archer's brain"; "neural efficiency in archers"; "fmri and archery"; "working memory in archers"; "archery trains the brain"

In practice

It is said that years of shooting train the brain as well as the body: the experienced archer would have a more organised attention, which carries over beyond the shooting line.

Evidence

Status history

  1. 1990 Not studied In the registry's bibliography there was not yet any image of an archer's brain at work, nor any comparison with people who do not shoot: the idea that years of shooting organise attention differently circulated without data.
  2. 2012 Reported The first image of an archer's brain at work arrives. A functional imaging comparison between twenty elite Korean female archers and twenty-three non-archers: at equal performance on the task the archers activate the middle frontal gyrus, the supplementary motor area and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex more, switch on areas that stay silent in the others, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and the insula, and switch off the precuneus and cingulate, the areas of mental rest, more strongly. There is no area where the non-archers activate more. Two limits matter: no region survives correction across the whole brain, and the sample is women only. A single cross-sectional study: reported.

Related

Related articles

Research lines

Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). At equal performance on a visuospatial task, experienced archers activate the frontal attention areas more (Version 1). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/expert-archers-frontal-activation

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_efficienzacerebralearciere,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {At equal performance on a visuospatial task, experienced archers activate the frontal attention areas more},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/expert-archers-frontal-activation},
  note = {Version 1; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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