Perception-action coupling in complex game play: Exploring the quiet eye in contested basketball jump shots

ABSTRACT

The duration of the final fixation before movement initiation – a gaze strategy labelled quiet eye – has been found to explain differences in motor expertise and performance in precision tasks. To date, research only addressed this phenomenon in situations without adversarial constraints. In the present study, we compared the quiet-eye behaviour of intermediately-skilled and highly-skilled basketball players in defended vs. undefended game situations. We predicted differences in quiet-eye duration as a function of skill and performance particularly resulting from late quiet-eye offsets. Results indicated performance-enhancing effects of long quiet-eye durations in the defended but not in the undefended game situation. Furthermore, in line with our prediction, later quiet-eye offsets were associated with superior performance elucidating the phenomenon’s relevance in online-demanding motor tasks. Further, earlier quiet-eye onsets were linked to successful performance supporting earlier suggestions that it is not only the duration but also the timing that matters. These findings not only extend the positive effects of the quiet eye in motor performance to dynamic game-play situations but also support the role of the quiet eye in response to programming and information processing respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Motor expertise
• motor control
• motor performance
• functionality

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the basketball players from the Melbourne Basketball Academy and the Australian U-21 Basketball team for participating in this study. The first author is financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (IZK0Z1_162324).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Different from earlier quiet-eye research, the quiet-eye fixation was not calculated by applying the functionality of a dispersion-based algorithm. This approach calculates fixations by considering the visual angle the point of gaze moves in a circular fashion. Since in the current study we were not able to calculate the visual angle because of missing distance information between the eye and the objects in space (for more information see, e.g., Duchowski, 2007), in addition to the minimum-duration requirement, we defined the quiet-eye fixation as anchoring at objects without taking the visual angle into account. However, when estimating the visual angle, the range of foveal vision (>3°) might have been exceeded.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [IZK0Z1_162324].