‘Quiet eye’: Notre Dame psychologist identifies links between a steady gaze and elite performance
In his book on basketball great Bill Bradley, writer John McPhee proposed that Bradley’s greatest asset had little to do with speed, strength or agility. It had to do, McPhee proposed, with his eyes.
“His most remarkable natural gift ... is his vision,” McPhee observed. “During a game, Bradley’s eyes are always a glaze of panoptic attention.”
The work of University of Notre Dame researcher Matthew Robison suggests that McPhee may have been on to something. In a recent study supported by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Army Research Institute, Robison documented a phenomenon in eye movement — or “oculomotor dynamics” — that links a steady, focused gaze with superior levels of performance.
Robison, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, made the discovery thanks to the unique capabilities of his lab, which includes more than a dozen precision instruments for tracking eye movement and pupil dilation. These devices capture images of the eyes every four milliseconds, providing 250 frames per second.
This ultra-detailed look at the eyes allows Robison to “read” the complex language of minute eye movement. A slight wiggle in the eye, for example, can reveal that a study participant was distracted by a stimulus entering their field of vision — even though their facial expression never altered. Or a dilation of the pupil might indicate a participant is struggling to solve a complex math problem.
Recently, though, Robison has been most interested not in why our eyes move, but in why we might — or might want to — keep them still. He was inspired to investigate the meaning of a steady gaze by the work of applied sports psychologists helping athletes achieve high levels of performance.
“Sports psychologists regularly advise that if you're about to putt, pick a spot on the back of the golf ball and keep your eyes still there for a second or two. Then hit the ball,” Robison said. “Or, if you’re shooting a free throw in basketball, pick a spot on the rim and focus on it for a few seconds. Then shoot the free throw. The advice seems sound in many cases. But the causal pathway behind this phenomenon has not been thoroughly demonstrated or explained.”
Robison hypothesized that a steady gaze had to do with attention control and thus would lead to better performance not only in sports but also in almost any mentally demanding activity, whether it was comprehending a difficult passage of text, solving a complex problem, remembering new information or multitasking. To test his hypothesis, he recruited nearly 400 participants to perform a series of tasks in his lab over a two-hour period while their gaze was being recorded by eye trackers and pupilometers.
Robison found that, across the board, those participants who kept their gaze steady in the moments just before being called upon to complete a task performed with greater speed and with greater accuracy. Borrowing a term from sports psychologist Joan Vickers, Robison called this specific quality of gaze “quiet eye.” He said it is more than a lack of motion. Like Bradley’s gaze that so impressed McPhee, “quiet” eyes are not just still. They are focused — able to resist distractions and remain vigilant, ready and “awake.”
His work documenting quiet eye suggested another question for Robison to explore: Would it be possible to train individuals to perform better by training them not in the task itself but in developing a steadier gaze?
Thanks to new funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Robison launched a new three-year project focused on answering that question. The funding is part of the ONR’s Young Investigator Award program, and Robison is one of just 25 awardees of the program over the past year. The funding will allow Robison to test new ways to train one’s gaze and to determine how far the effects of “quiet eye” reach.
“Our aim is to make the benefits of ‘quiet eye’ available to anyone who wants to learn them,” he said.
And while it will not immediately lead to Bill Bradley levels of basketball virtuosity, the benefits could be widespread. Robison hopes that “those who learn this skill are able, in turn, to sustain and control their attention, which will yield benefits for their performance in almost any complex or demanding task.”
Natalie Steinhauser, a program officer at the Office of Naval Research, said she looks forward to starting this new research that bridges two aspects of her Prepared Warfighter Portfolio. Her portfolio focuses on “understanding attention control and how it impacts warfighter performance” and “accelerating and innovating training approaches to maximize warfighter readiness.” This research, she said “brings those worlds together in hopes of training our naval warfighters to optimize their attention and, thus, performance.”
Robison’s research is one instance in a broad effort by Notre Dame researchers to explore the science of elite performance. To advance this effort, Notre Dame Research is partnering with Notre Dame Athletics to provide new facilities, infrastructure and funding. To learn more, contact sportsperformance@nd.edu or athleticsresearch-list@nd.edu.
Originally published by at research.nd.edu on March 24.
Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu
Latest Colleges & Schools
- ‘Prebunking’ false election claims may boost trust in electionsIn recent years, democracies worldwide have seen a growing erosion of trust in election outcomes and institutions, driven in part by fears of widespread fraud. New Notre Dame research finds that “prebunking” — providing accurate information before false claims spread — boosts trust in elections more effectively than traditional fact-checking.
- Justice Amy Coney Barrett to deliver Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government lectureAmy Coney Barrett, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, will speak at the University of Notre Dame at 4 p.m. Sept. 12 in the Leighton Concert Hall of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
- Three Notre Dame researchers win NEH grants for humanities-based projectsDavid Hernandez, the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Associate Professor of Classics, and Morgan Munsen, senior research and partnerships program manager at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs, have each won an NEH Collaborative Research grant. Thomas A. Stapleford, associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies, is leading a team that has been awarded a Humanities Research Center on Artificial Intelligence grant.
- Open-access database offers insights into U.S. congressional candidatesEach election cycle, thousands of candidates vie for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. Until now, there has been no comprehensive, publicly available resource cataloging what those candidates say about who they are or what they stand for. A new open-access database called CampaignView, created by researchers at the University of Notre Dame, offers researchers, journalists and educators a powerful tool to understand congressional elections.
- First impressions count: How babies are talked about during ultrasounds impacts parent perceptions, caregiving relationshipPsychologist Kaylin Hill studied the impact of a parent’s first impression of their baby during an ultrasound exam. The words used by the medical professional to describe the baby (positive or negative) influence how the parents perceive their baby, relate to them after they're born and even how that child behaves as a toddler. The research has broad implications for how we train medical professionals to interact with expectant parents, as well as how we care for parents during the perinatal period when they are most susceptible to depression.
- Prioritizing prenatal care may decrease low birth weight outcomes in The Gambia, Notre Dame research findsA new study co-authored by University of Notre Dame researchers highlights the importance of prenatal care for improving the health of mothers and newborns, providing evidence that can inform policy.
