When watching an expert archer shoot, the brains of archers respond more than those of people who do not shoot

1 study · 41 archers measured

There is a single study on this question, from Korea, published in 2011. Twenty expert women archers, with fifteen years of shooting on average and five of them in the national team, and twenty-one women who had never competed watch short videos of an archer shooting inside an MRI scanner. In both groups the premotor, medial prefrontal and parietal cortices and the cerebellum switch on, among them the areas that also work when the movement is actually made; in the archers, though, the activation is wider, and in the direct comparison they show more activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the inferior parietal cortex, the premotor cortex, the anterior and posterior cingulate and the parahippocampal gyrus, with a correction for multiple comparisons across the whole brain. The reverse comparison finds no area where the non-archers respond more. The result is clear-cut, but it rests on one sample, all women, and it says nothing about what the extra activity is for: nobody has linked it to how much an archer learns or how well they shoot.

Also phrased as: "watching videos of top archers"; "mirror neurons in archery"; "observing an expert's shot"; "learning by watching other archers"

In practice

Archers are told to watch videos of top archers often, because someone who knows the movement reads it differently from someone who has never shot and, by watching it, somehow rehearses it.

Evidence

2011
For Archers Published later

20 expert Korean women archers (15.1 years of shooting on average, five of them in the national team) and 21 women who had never competed watch videos of an expert archer shooting, face blurred, inside an MRI scanner: in the direct comparison the archers show more activity in the premotor cortex (two clusters of 618 and 417 voxels, t 4.45 and 4.18), the parietal cortex (314 and 411 voxels), the superior temporal sulcus (166 and 209), the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the anterior (858 and 550) and posterior cingulate and the parahippocampal gyrus, at p < 0.05 corrected for multiple comparisons across the whole brain. No score and no shooting: observation only.

Neural correlates related to action observation in expert archers · Yang-Tae Kim, Jee-Hye Seo, Hui-Jin Song, Done-Sik Yoo, Hui Joong Lee, Jongmin Lee, Gunyoung Lee, Eunjin Kwon, Jin Goo Kim, Yongmin Chang
2011
For Archers Published later

In the same study, the reverse comparison: no brain area is more active in the non-archers than in the expert archers, at the same corrected threshold. The difference runs entirely one way, but it is a comparison between people who have known the movement for fifteen years and people who do not shoot, not between archers of different levels.

Neural correlates related to action observation in expert archers · Yang-Tae Kim, Jee-Hye Seo, Hui-Jin Song, Done-Sik Yoo, Hui Joong Lee, Jongmin Lee, Gunyoung Lee, Eunjin Kwon, Jin Goo Kim, Yongmin Chang

Status history

1990 Not studied In the registry's bibliography nobody has yet looked at what happens in an archer's brain while they watch another archer shoot, or compared it with the brain of someone who has never held a bow: the question has not been asked.
2011 Reported A Korean functional MRI study has twenty expert women archers and twenty-one women who have never competed watch videos of an expert archer shooting. The archers show more activity in the premotor and parietal cortices, areas that also switch on when the movement is actually made, and also in the superior temporal sulcus, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the anterior and posterior cingulate and the parahippocampal gyrus, with a correction for multiple comparisons across the whole brain. The reverse comparison finds no area where the non-archers respond more. It is a single cross-sectional comparison, and of women only: reported.

Research lines

30 studiesThe archer's brain: EEG, evoked potentials, fMRI and fNIRS

Cite

APA

Campagna, M. (2026). When watching an expert archer shoot, the brains of archers respond more than those of people who do not shoot (Version 1). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/watching-archery-brain-archers

BibTeX

@misc{campagna2026_osservazionetirocervelloesperte,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {When watching an expert archer shoot, the brains of archers respond more than those of people who do not shoot},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/watching-archery-brain-archers},
  note = {Version 1; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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