Multifractality in postural sway supports quiet eye training in aiming tasks: A study of golf putting

The present research examined the immediate impact of challenge and threat states on golf performance in both real competition and a laboratory-based task. In Study 1, 199 experienced golfers reported their evaluations of competition demands and personal coping resources before a golf competition. Evaluating the competition as a challenge (i.e., sufficient resources to cope with demands) was associated with superior performance. In Study 2, 60 experienced golfers randomly received challenge or threat manipulation instructions and then performed a competitive golf-putting task. Challenge and threat states were successfully manipulated and the challenge group outperformed the threat group. Furthermore, the challenge group reported less anxiety, more facilitative interpretations of anxiety, less conscious processing, and displayed longer quiet eye durations. However, these variables failed to mediate the group–performance relationship. These studies demonstrate the importance of considering preperformance psychophysiological states when examining the influence of competitive pressure on motor performance.

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Multifractality in postural sway supports quiet eye training in aiming tasks: A study of golf putting

10.1101/2020.08.19.258053 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Noah Jacobson ◽

Quinn Berleman-Paul ◽

Madhur Mangalam ◽

Damian G. Kelty-Stephen

Keyword(s):

Optic Flow ◽

Degrees Of Freedom ◽

Postural Sway ◽

Visually Guided ◽

Adaptive Responses ◽

Action Sports ◽

Context Sensitive ◽

Task Goal ◽

Radial Error ◽

Quiet Eye

AbstractThe ‘quiet eye’ (QE) approach to visually-guided aiming behavior invests fully in perceptual information’s potential to organize coordinated action. Sports psychologists refer to QE as the stillness of the eyes during aiming tasks and increasingly into self- and externally-paced tasks. Amidst the ‘noisy’ fluctuations of the athlete’s body, quiet eyes might leave fewer saccadic interruptions to the coupling between postural sway and optic flow. Postural sway exhibits fluctuations whose multifractal structure serves as a robust predictor of visual and haptic perceptual responses. Postural sway generates optic flow centered on an individual’s eye height. We predicted that perturbing the eye height by attaching wooden blocks below the feet would perturb the putting more so in QE-trained participants than those trained technically. We also predicted that QE’s efficacy and responses to this perturbation would depend on multifractality in postural sway. Specifically, we predicted that less multifractality would predict more adaptive responses to the perturbation and higher putting accuracy. Results showed that lower multifractality led to more frequent successful putts, and the perturbation of eye height led to less frequent successful putts, particularly for QE-trained participants. Models of radial error (i.e., the distance between the ball’s final position and the hole) indicated that lower estimates of multifractality due to nonlinearity coincided with a more adaptive response to the perturbation. These results suggest that reduced multifractality may act in a context-sensitive manner to restrain motoric degrees of freedom to achieve the task goal.

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On the Interaction of Attentional Focus and Gaze: The Quiet Eye Inhibits Focus-Related Performance Decrements

Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology ◽

10.1123/jsep.2013-0273 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 36 (4) ◽

pp. 392-400 ◽

Cited By ~ 30

Author(s):

André Klostermann ◽

Ralf Kredel ◽

Ernst-Joachim Hossner

Keyword(s):

High Performance ◽

Alternative Hypothesis ◽

Large Body ◽

Attentional Focus ◽

Focus Of Attention ◽

Causal Chain ◽

Gaze Behavior ◽

Golf Putting ◽

Quiet Eye

To date, despite a large body of evidence in favor of the advantage of an effect-related focus of attention compared with a movement-related focus of attention in motor control and learning, the role of vision in this context remains unclear. Therefore, in a golf-putting study, the relation between attentional focus and gaze behavior (in particular, quiet eye, or QE) was investigated. First, the advantage of an effect-related focus, as well as of a long QE duration, could be replicated. Furthermore, in the online-demanding task of golf putting, high performance was associated with later QE offsets. Most decisively, an interaction between attentional focus and gaze behavior was revealed in such a way that the efficiency of the QE selectively manifested under movement-related focus instructions. As these findings suggest neither additive effects nor a causal chain, an alternative hypothesis is introduced explaining positive QE effects by the inhibition of not-to-be parameterized movement variants.

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