A longer quiet eye improves shooting accuracy

3 studies · 58 archers measured

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.

The registry's bibliography holds a single archery study linking the quiet eye to accuracy, and the link comes from a comparison between skill levels: Olympic-level archers held their gaze steady on the target for almost two seconds against less than one for the novices, and with the two groups pooled, longer durations went with smaller errors. Read that way, quiet eye duration may be no more than another way of saying that someone has been shooting for years. The most interesting detail is where the difference sits: in the experts the fixation starts earlier rather than ending later, and it takes up almost a third of the aiming time against less than a fifth, with the same number of seconds per arrow. What 2025 brought is instrumentation, not answers: two papers show the quiet eye can be measured with electro-oculography instead of an eye tracker, but neither puts duration next to the score of the arrow.

Also phrased as: "quiet eye and archery score"; "longer final fixation on the target"; "steady gaze before the loose"; "quiet eye training in archery"

In practice

It is often taught that holding a steady gaze on the target for longer, in the seconds before the loose, makes the shot more accurate.

Evidence

2017
For Archers Published later

10 Olympic-level archers from the British team and 10 university-level novices, 24 arrows at 30 m: a quiet eye of 1.96 seconds in the experts against 0.76 in the novices (F(1,20) = 8.09, p = 0.012) and, with the two groups pooled, longer durations associated with smaller radial errors (R squared = 0.38, p = 0.006, over 20 archers). The difference lies in the onset of the fixation, which comes earlier in the experts (t(20) = 3.66, p = 0.002), not in its end, which does not change; as a share of shot time the quiet eye takes up 29.4% in the experts against 18.1% in the novices, with the same number of seconds per arrow. The same link between duration and error turns up in a computer aiming task with 30 participants, archers and non-archers pooled (R squared 0.41 and 0.45). It is a comparison across skill levels, not between arrows of the same archer.

Exploring the quiet eye in archery using field- and laboratory-based tasks · Claudia C. Gonzalez, Joe Causer, Michael J. Grey, Glyn W. Humphreys, R. Chris Miall, A. Mark Williams
2025
Context Archers Published later

10 licensed club archers, 60 shots recorded with electro-oculography, a methodological study: a CNN-LSTM network on the filtered signal detects the quiet eye with an accuracy of about 0.93 in the results table (the abstract says 0.95; positive predictive value 0.948, sensitivity 0.962) and, in the scenario with the cleanest signal, places its start to within 7 milliseconds on average and its end to within 4. It does not relate duration to score. The figures come from the preprint, not the published version.

Automated detection of quiet eye durations in archery using electrooculography and comparative deep learning models · Fatma Söğüt, Hüseyin Yanık, Evren Değirmenci, İnci Kesilmiş, Ülkü Çömelekoğlu
2025
Context Archers Published later

18 young Turkish archers, nine girls and nine boys of about 17 with at least two years of practice, 18 arrows each between 30 and 50 m, quiet eye measured with electro-oculography: a mean duration of 0.81 seconds on the horizontal channel, 0.59 on the right eye and 0.71 on the left. The models the study builds on top of those numbers are set aside, since they are trained partly on computer-generated data and cannot be read as results about archers; the journal is a regional venue.

Determinants of Electrooculography Measurements for Quiet Eye Duration in Archers via Penalty Regularizer · Fatma Söğüt, İnci Kesilmiş, Evrim Ersin Kangal, Ülkü Çömelekoğlu

Status history

1984 Not studied No study in the registry's bibliography had yet measured the quiet eye in archers.
2017 Reported The registry's first quiet eye study in archery finds longer durations in expert archers, associated with smaller errors, in twenty archers and comparing skill levels.
2025 Reported The year brings measurement work rather than answers, so the status does not change. A Turkish group measures the quiet eye with electro-oculography instead of an eye tracker and, in eighteen young archers shooting between 30 and 50 m, finds durations between 0.6 and 0.8 seconds. A second paper from the same group validates the method: a neural network detects the quiet eye with an accuracy of around 93 to 95% and, given a clean signal, places its start and end to within a few milliseconds. That is good practical news, since electro-oculography costs far less than an eye tracker, but neither paper puts duration next to the score of the arrow.

Related studies

Theoretical workIl pavimento (The floor): how much of archery is real

Research lines

Cite

APA

Campagna, M. (2026). A longer quiet eye improves shooting accuracy (Version 2). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/quiet-eye-accuracy

BibTeX

@misc{campagna2026_quieteyeprecisione,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {A longer quiet eye improves shooting accuracy},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/quiet-eye-accuracy},
  note = {Version 2; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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