The dynamics of Quiet Eye under stress in elite table tennis performance

ABSTRACT

Quiet Eye (QE) has been accounted as a mechanism that contributes to visuomotor coordination, an important process in athletic performance. QE is defined as the final fixation on a specific location or object in the visuomotor workspace, within 3° of visual angle, for a minimum of 100 ms that enables the athletes to gather relevant information before a critical movement. Several lines of research have shown that QE is affected by stress and that this alteration further leads to decreased task performance. The present study determined whether stress affects QE in elite table tennis performance. Athletes performed a table tennis exercise in which they had to hit a sequence of 100 balls. Each athlete underwent the exercise in a stressful condition and in a non-stressful one, while gaze behaviour was captured using Tobii Glasses 2 eye tracking system. We first found that athletes made longer QE before successfully hit balls than before missed balls, confirming that longer QE supports accuracy. More importantly, QE and performance decreased in the stressful condition, but athletes still displayed longer QE durations in hit, compared to missed balls under stress. The present results show that stress affects QE and, subsequently, performance, but also that better performance under stress is associated with longer QE duration.

KEYWORDS:

• Quiet eye
• stress
• table tennis
• elite athletes

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, [REDACTED]. The data are not publicly available because they were gathered from athletes that can be identified (i.e., based on their national and international official rankings), hence their privacy would be affected.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Tobii Pro AB for supplying the eyetracking system and to the sport club CSA Steaua Bucuresti for granting access to the athletes and all needed sports facilities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since our locations were not predefined, one of the reviewers suggested that fixations that are outside the relevant zone (e.g., on the walls) could reflect eye-tracking errors, likely due to calibration problems. Therefore, we conducted a refined analysis that included only fixations on the racket of the coach when launching the ball (95.21%). We obtained quasi-identical results for the effect of accuracy (F(1,8)    18.07, p = .003, η²_p = .69), stress (F(1,8)    18.75, p = .003, η²_p = .70), and the for the interaction of the two (F(1,8)    4.28, p = .07, η²_p = .34).

 

Additional information

Funding

The study was approved by the Ethical Committee of Research of University of Bucharest with the decision number 98/05.12.2019