How training your gaze could help you master sports

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View our Twitter (X) feed View our Youtube channel View our Instagram feed View our Substack feed Search Popular SearchesCritical thinkingPhilosophyEmotional IntelligenceFree Will Latest Videos Latest Articles How training your gaze could help you master sports — and your own attention

Elite athletes train their “quiet eye.” What happens if the rest of us do the same?

by Ross Pomeroy January 29, 2026 A stylized human figure runs in front of a large, abstract eye, with geometric shapes and colorful patterns in the background.

A stylized human figure runs in front of a large, abstract eye, with geometric shapes and colorful patterns in the background.

Mark Pernice Key Takeaways

Many elite athletes train their “quiet eye,” a sustained gaze that helps the brain execute precise actions under pressure, to improve performance.
Research suggests that quiet eye training can be beneficial in high-pressure fields other than sports, like surgery.
One scientist is now exploring whether the quiet eye can help everyday people regain control of their attention in an increasingly distracted world.

Professional sports are the playgrounds of the physically gifted. But size, speed, and strength aren’t the only factors that matter. For all of the tall, fast, and chiseled elite athletes, there are a few who look, well, like the rest of us. Soccer’s Diego Maradona, basketball’s Steve Nash, and hockey’s Wayne Gretzky come to mind. Yet despite these athletes’ comparatively unexceptional physical attributes, they still reached the pinnacle of performance in their respective arenas. What, then, sets them apart?

More than four decades ago, Joan Vickers developed a hypothesis.

This inkling emerged when Vickers was a PhD student learning from some of the greatest cognitive scientists of all time, including Anne Treisman and Daniel Kahneman. From perception psychologist Stan Coren, she learned how to record eye movements with sophisticated trackers. In that lab, she thought back to her past dalliances with greatness in her own small corner of the sporting world.

As an undergraduate at the University of New Brunswick more than a decade prior, Vickers had played four years of varsity volleyball and varsity basketball. There were a few rare instances in which she performed far beyond her usual capabilities. In one basketball game, she simply couldn’t miss a shot. And during one volleyball match, she served out an entire game. In those moments, she was absolutely sure she had mastered the sports. Alas, her brushes with athletic brilliance proved fleeting.

“It was all gone the next day!” Vickers would later write.

What propelled those special performances? And, more broadly, what separates elite athletes from amateurs? In her PhD program, she wondered if the pivotal difference came down to vision, not strictly in sharpness of sight, but in how the eyes are used.

To test her hypothesis, Vickers had gymnasts of different skill levels sit with their heads held still in a chin rest. She then asked them to scan a sequence of slides of gymnastic sequences while trackers monitored their eye movements. In that early experiment, she noticed a striking difference in gaze between experts and non-experts. It would become the primary focus of her scientific career.

The quiet eye

What Vickers first noticed then — and what has been borne out in numerous experiments over the decades since — is that, before initiating an action, elite athletes fixate on a target of interest earlier and for longer than amateurs do. This gaze, lasting at least 100 milliseconds but no more than a few seconds, is laser-focused. Think about a basketball player glancing at the hoop before pulling up for a contested jump shot, a soccer player eyeballing his running teammate before threading a precise pass, or a hockey goaltender picking out the puck through a throng of bodies.

Vickers termed this subtle yet powerful gaze the “quiet eye.” Years later, after coming to understand it mechanistically, she endowed it with a more exact definition: The final fixation or tracking gaze fixed within a 3° visual angle or less, at a specific location or object in the visuomotor environment, lasting at least 100 ms before the beginning of a critical phase of the movement and continuing until the fixation is no longer on the location.

The quiet eye has now been exhaustively studied in sporting contexts, and it firmly distinguishes professionals from amateurs. A 2007 meta-analysis reported that experts’ quiet eye duration is 62% longer than that of non-experts. Why might this extended look translate to elite performance?

“In all sporting activities, elite performers are able to focus intently not only on what location is most relevant, but also when information from that location must be accessed and for how long,” Vickers wrote in 2016. “[T]hose who consistently achieve high levels of performance have learned to fixate or track critical objects or locations for earlier and longer durations … They have found a way to see critical information sooner, thus enabling the transmission of higher quality commands to the motor system.”

Training your gaze

To understand why the quiet eye is so powerful, you have to look at what the brain does with that moment of unwavering focus.

When a person fixates on a target, their retina captures visual information and sends it to the brain via the optic nerve. When this information arrives at the brain’s occipital lobe, specific regions analyze shape, color, and motion. The brain’s dorsal attention network and ventral attention network are activated next. The former enables us to focus on essential details by filtering distractions; the latter processes emotional reactions and memories. After that, the brain’s frontal regions use the processed data to initiate motor responses, such as a basketball shot or a golf swing. Finally, the brain commands the body to physically act. Concurrently, the cerebellum and basal ganglia refine the movement, ensuring the fidelity of the chosen action.

“An analogy I often use describes the [quiet eye] as a ‘GPS system’ that feeds the brain with the optimal spatial information needed for an action to be effectively organized, initiated, and controlled,” Vickers wrote.

Accuracy increased significantly more for quiet-eye-trained subjects than for players who didn’t undergo the training.

Vickers and her contemporaries have helped people hone their quiet eye in a variety of contexts, mostly sports. These training sessions are often specifically tailored to the sport.

In volleyball, for instance, Vickers sought to augment players’ quiet eyes to boost their service reception and passing. She created a number of drills where players were asked to track small objects, identify numbers placed on balls as they were served, and identify numbers within time constraints. One month after completion of the training exercises, players’ quiet eye metrics improved on court. In competition over a three-year span, their passing accuracy also rose 7% relative to a control group of players.

In a study focused on helping varsity basketball players shoot free throws, quiet eye training proved even more beneficial. Players instructed to fixate on the front of the rim before shooting improved their accuracy significantly more than players taught how to improve their arm mechanics. One year later, quiet-eye-trained subjects’ accuracy increased from 54% to 76%, significantly higher than the accuracy of players from teams that did not undergo the training protocol.

With all the work that Vickers has put into teaching others to enhance their quiet eye, has she ever trained herself?

“I did actually recently train myself,” she told Big Think via email. “I was working with an LPGA golfer who had the yips. … I was playing a fair bit of golf myself and decided to work on a method that would help her not be so technically obsessed. All her thoughts were directed toward controlling her hands, arms, body, head, and the putter. It seemed to me she forgot to aim. I presented an aiming method which I sent to her. She rejoined the tour and had a few years of success. Bridgestone golf recently ‘borrowed’ the method and marketed a ‘Mind Set’ golf ball.”

When tested in a higher-stress condition, the quiet eye group excelled, while the control group languished.

Researchers have also explored whether the benefits of quiet eye training can extend beyond sports. In 2023, for example, a team of researchers based in the Czech Republic utilized a form of quiet eye training to help focus the attention of children with ADHD.

In 2014, Vickers was part of a study that recruited 20 first-year surgical residents and split them into two groups. Both groups received traditional training on how to tie surgical knots, which are used for suturing organs, vessels, and tissues so they can heal properly, but one group also received quiet eye training.

This training taught them to focus their gaze on the exact location of the knot before looping the sutures. They learned the technique by watching a video of an expert surgeon overlaid with a black circle that indicated where the surgeon was looking. The control group also saw this video, but the circle was removed — they saw only the surgeon’s hand movements. Later, when both groups of residents were practicing their knots, the quiet eye group was told to employ sustained gazes while the control group was not.

When both groups were then tested in a low-stress scenario, they performed about equally in their knot tying. But when they were tested in a higher-stress condition — one in which they were told they’d be ranked against their peers — the quiet eye group excelled, while the control group languished.

A quiet eye for all?

Can you train your quiet eye at home? A number of influencers and companies now sell technology and techniques for doing so, but Vickers is skeptical they can deliver.

“I am afraid many of these companies have attempted to find a simpler way to measure the quiet eye and implement training,” she told Big Think. “I have serious reservations regarding the methods some use, especially optometrists and sports vision trainers who try to incorporate the quiet eye into their traditional methods.”

One researcher, however, is putting in the scientific work to help everyone train their quiet eye.

“This is, more than anything, an attentional phenomenon.”
Matthew Robison

Members of the Controlled Attention and Memory Lab at the University of Notre Dame investigate “the reasons for normal variation in cognitive abilities as well as within-person variation in cognitive performance.” One way they do this is through measuring the movements of subjects’ eyes and changes to their pupils, the dark circular openings in the center of the iris.

Dr. Matthew Robison heads the lab. One fascinating facet of human cognition that he and his lab members have extensively elucidated is that people who have stable pupils tend to have higher attention control and better memory abilities. “Moment to moment, trial to trial, the people who have really consistent pupil diameters perform better on a wide variety of tasks,” he told Big Think.

This finding also extends to gaze. In one experiment, Robison asked subjects to stare at a fixed point for two minutes, seeking to gauge how well they could keep their eyes focused and still. He discovered that people who struggled with the task also scored poorly on cognitive measures of attention. This prompted him to look into prior data recorded in his lab.

“Really robustly we found that, within and across people, fixation stability was a powerful predictor of performance,” said Robison. He wondered if this was a novel finding, and a search of the scientific literature soon led him to the quiet eye: “There’s so much on this I was almost embarrassed I hadn’t read this before.”

Robison noticed that the research was almost solely focused on improving performance in sports, but what really drives him — his scientific bread and butter, so to speak — is attention. He would love to translate what goes on in his lab full of eye trackers into something actionable that people could use to better control their attention in their day-to-day lives. Maybe quiet eye training could be the answer.

“This is, more than anything, an attentional phenomenon,” said Robison. “What they’re strengthening when they coach people on the quiet eye technique is their ability to constrain and control and sustain their attention.”

Reclaiming our attention

If there was ever a time that called for a technique to take back control of our attention, it’s now.

As digital distractions, from texting, social media, breaking news, work, and more, increasingly encroach on our lives, our average attention span — the length of time a person is able to concentrate mentally on a specific activity — has shrunk. In the digital world, the average amount of time we look at one screen before switching to another dwindled from 150 seconds in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2019. Offline, the average amount of time we stay focused on one thing is now about 30 seconds in kids and 70 seconds in adults. As journalist Johann Hari wrote in 2022, “Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.”

Robison wants to help people reclaim it. A blunt method of taking back attention is simply eliminating distractions. For example, at home with his family, Robison often puts his phone in a drawer. But we live in a digitally dominated world — it’s not workable for most people to dump their devices in order to regain their focus. A longer-term solution is to learn to co-exist with technological distractions, to train our attention. In a new project, Robison is adapting the quiet eye technique into training protocols to help people do just that.

“When you feel like your attention is not under your control anymore, it feels like your life is not under your control.”
Matthew Robison

Backed by funding from the Office of Naval Research, Robison is conducting a study designed to ascertain the training’s effectiveness. The study involves a series of increasingly difficult, gamified tasks in which participants try to keep their gaze fixed on targets on a screen — sometimes moving targets, or targets surrounded by distractions — while a tracker monitors their eye movements.

Robison plans to make this protocol and any associated materials publicly available, so, if it proves beneficial, anybody could train their attention on their own devices. As he sees it, mastering attention is about something far deeper and more meaningful than just doing better at sports, school, or work.

“I do think people are starting to feel a loss of agency,” Robison told Big Think. “They don’t get to pay attention to the things they feel like they need to or want to. They feel like their attention is always being pulled in a million directions at once, whether that be because of their devices, or because of their Slack channels, or because of the demands of modern living.”

“I think that has an effect on people’s happiness and their wellbeing,” he continued. “When you feel like your attention is not under your control anymore, it feels like your life is not under your control. That is a very stressful existence. If we can wrest control of our attention, we might live more happy and fulfilling lives.”

Ross Pomeroy

Editor, RealClearScience

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