Locating the Quiet Eye: Gaze variability as an insight to expert goalkeeping performance

Franks, Benjamin, Jakeman, John and Roberts, William M ORCID: 0000-0001-5736-5244 (2019) Locating the Quiet Eye: Gaze variability as an insight to expert goalkeeping performance. In: BASES Student Conference, April 2019, Dundee. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The Quiet Eye (QE) has emerged as a key perceptual mechanism associated with skilled actions and expertise in sport performance. The QE is defined as the final fixation towards a location in the environment that supports a coupled motor action, lasting over 100ms.Vickers, 2016, Kinesiology Review, 5(2), 119-128). In football goalkeeping the QE has been found to be one of the key mechanisms in understanding skilled performance. Yet, there remain a number of conflicts in regard to the actual location used, and the timing of these fixations in a skilled action. The aim of this study was to meet an ecological ‘call to arms’ and challenge traditional understanding of optimal gaze fixations as a tenant of expertise. Having been granted institutional ethical approval, data was collected over the course of a season in a representative experimental trial, four goalkeepers took part in three data collection sessions comprised of 90 recorded trials. Adopting a manual Vision-In-Action system, raw data was analysed to locate the QE fixation occurring prior to the movement execution. Professional goalkeepers exhibited functional behaviours, utilising different information sources under different gaze strategies . Independent t-tests found significant differences between the use of the ball compared to the visual pivot (VP) in QE onset (t2=4.61, P =0.04; ball, 40.23% ± 3.67% v VP, 32.76% ± 2.21%)) and offset (t2=4.89, P = 0.03; ball, 87.13% ± 2.26% v VP, 77.99% ± 5.38%) but not in QE duration. It is hypothesised that the timing of the QE may hold more weight than the length of the fixation. This was further supported by a between group variation analysis for onset (F (3,54) = 3.68, P = 0.02), offset (F (3,54) = 3.16, P = 0.03) but not in duration (F(3,54) = 0.24, P = 0.87). Between group variation provides a platform to challenge the increasingly popular QE training domain and raises questions at the use of putative optimal gaze patterns and propose that it is in fact the functionality of information and movement that is key for expert performance. Future work is required in adopting an affordance-based control framework to embed the QE in within the complex make up of constraints on skilled performance.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Quiet eye; Goalkeeping performance
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GV Recreation Leisure > GV557 Sports > GV0711 Coaching
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Education and Science
Research Priority Areas:	Health, Life Sciences, Sport and Wellbeing
Depositing User:	Will Roberts
Date Deposited:	03 May 2019 16:13
Last Modified:	31 Aug 2023 09:08
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/6769

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