INVITED REVIEW

Review: The Quiet Eye in Sports Performance—Is the Quiet Eye the
Ultimate Explanation or Only the Beginning?
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Kristine Dalton, OD, PhD, FAAO1*

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SIGNIFICANCE: The quiet eye is a gaze behavior that seems to differentiate both expert-novice performance and
successful and unsuccessful performance in experts; however, the quiet eye may only represent one aspect of the
perceptual-cognitive expertise differences that exist between athletes and nonathletes.
Research suggests that expert-novice differences in vision and visual-motor coordination skills exist between ath-
letes and nonathletes, although the underlying mechanisms driving these differences are not well understood. The
quiet eye is the final fixation or tracking gaze made before the initiation of the action of importance in a motor co-
ordination task and is quite possibly the most well-studied vision strategy variable in sport. The quiet eye has been
shown to be a key component of both expert ability and successful performance. However, the quiet eye is not without
its criticisms, and the perceptual mechanisms underlying this unique gaze behavior are not yet well understood. The
question that remains to be answered is whether the differences in vision and visual-motor coordination skills that
exist between athletes and nonathletes can be explained by the quiet eye alone or if the explanation is more
complicated.

Author Affiliations:
1
School of Optometry and Vision
Science, University of Waterloo,
Optom Vis Sci 2021;98:732–737. doi:10.1097/OPX.0000000000001728 Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Copyright © 2021 American Academy of Optometry *kndalton@uwaterloo.ca

Curiosity about what makes athletes so exceptionally good at
what they do, especially when compared with the average human,
dates back to the early 21st century or, more specifically, 1921,
when researchers attempted to determine what made Babe Ruth
the greatest home-run hitter of all time.1 In the century since, many
researchers have attempted to answer those very questions: do ath-
letes (experts) have better vision than nonathletes (novices)? If
expert-novice differences exist, are they physiological or learned?
If expert-novice differences are learned, are they trainable and does
training improve on-field performance?
Sherman2 conducted one of the first extensive literature reviews
examining the role of vision in sport and concluded that vision was
the “signal” driving the muscle response in sports activities. Sherman2
suggested that visual tasks, such as dynamic visual acuity, depth
perception, eye movement accuracy and speed, peripheral vision,
and visualization, could be of greater importance in sports. Sherman2
went on further to suggest that these visual tasks could be en-
hanced through training. Stine et al.3 expanded upon the work of
Sherman2 and concluded that various athletic groups had superior
visual abilities to nonathletic groups, particularly on tasks that were
more representative of the demands of sport such as peripheral vi-
sion and dynamic visual acuity. Hitzeman and Beckerman4 also
found that there were certain visual skills that were important to
sports performance and that visual skills of athletes and nonath-
letes differ. Research from Laby et al.,5 demonstrating that profes-
sional baseball players had superior vision compared with the
general population, further supports this conclusion.
On the other hand, Starkes and Deakin,6 Rothstein,7 Abernethy,8
and Hughes et al.9 argued that there was no difference between ath-
letes and nonathletes, at least when their vision was compared with
standard, often static, clinical tests. Abernethy10 went on to suggest
that enhancement of the visual hardware or refractive, binocular vi-
sion, and ocular health status of athletes beyond normal levels was
unlikely to improve sports performance. Instead, Abernethy10 rec-
ommended improving athletes' visual perceptual strategies or soft-
ware as a means to enhancing sports performance instead. By the
time Erickson11 published his book in 2007, the question of
whether athletes did indeed have better vision than nonathletes
was still hotly contested.
Most recently, work by Laby et al.,12,13 Burris et al.,14 and Liu
et al.15 have consistently demonstrated that athletes have a combi-
nation of superior visual and visual-motor coordination abilities
compared with nonathletes. Moreover, these research groups have
demonstrated that, within athlete populations, there are differ-
ences, as professionals have also been shown to have superior vi-
sual abilities compared with amateurs.12–15
Considering the evidence that has been collected to date, it
seems likely that expert-novice visual performance differences ex-
ist. The questions that remain to be answered now are whether
these differences are physiological or learned and whether they
are trainable. An underlying theme across all the literature investi-
gating expert-novice visual performance differences in sport is that
the differences are more often found in aspects of vision that have
stronger functional relationships to performance tasks at hand.

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Differences in visual functions that are more likely enhanced
through learning, such as dynamic visual acuity, oculomotor control,
and visuomotor reaction times, are frequently reported.2,3,12–15
Differences in physiological aspects of vision such as static visual
acuity and contrast sensitivity have also been noted, albeit less
frequently.2,3,5 Thus, it seems that the recommendation of
Abernethy10 to improve athlete's software as a means of enhancing
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sports performance was well founded.
Perhaps the most prominent sports performance software com-
ponent that has been studied to date is the quiet eye. Presently, the
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quiet eye is defined as the “the final fixation or tracking gaze prior
to the onset of the critical action, that is located on a specific loca-
tion or object in the visuomotor workspace within [1° to] 3° of visual
angle (or less) for a minimum of 100 ms.”16–21 The quiet eye has
been proposed as the period when task-relevant environmental
cues are processed and motor plans are coordinated for successful
completion of the upcoming task.
The earliest published work investigating the vision strategy of
golfers and what would later be termed the quiet eye was con-
ducted in the early 1990s at the University of Calgary by Dr. Joan
Vickers. Vickers22 recorded the eye movements of both lower-
and higher-skilled golfers while they performed consecutive flat
3-m putts until 10 hits (successful putts) and 10 misses were ob-
tained. The lower-skilled golfers would have been considered
very good amateurs or average club-level golfers, whereas the
higher-skilled golfers would have all been very good club-level
players. Golfers wore a mobile eye tracker, and various gaze be-
haviors were examined throughout the duration of the putt, in-
cluding the length and location of specific fixations and the
pattern of fixations and saccades used.
Higher-skilled golfers were found to use a vision strategy that in-
cluded longer fixations on the ball and the target and fewer fixations
on the club compared with the lower-skilled golfers. Higher-skilled
golfers also used more express saccades to shift their gaze between
targets faster and maintained their gaze on the putting surface lon-
ger after ball contact. Finally, the last fixation before the initiation
of the backswing was found to be longer (1788 vs. 911 milliseconds)
in golfers with higher skill levels. The last fixation before backswing
initiation was also found to be longer on successful putts, regardless
of the golfer's skill level. Based on these results, Vickers22 proposed
that an ideal vision strategy in putting would be one in which express
saccades to the putter were used in the preparation phase, along
with a single fixation of greater than 1700 milliseconds directed to
the ball during the back/forward swing phase and a stable fixation
on the green for more than 200 milliseconds after ball contact. This
strategy was hypothesized to improve golfer's performance by reduc-
ing the amount of distracting information collected throughout the
swing and increasing the precision of the visual-motor coordination
of the hands when the putter contacted the ball.
In 1996, Vickers16,23 explored the vision strategies of expert
and near-expert basketball players while they completed 10 suc-
cessful and 10 unsuccessful free throws. Vickers looked at several
different aspects of the players' free throws, including the duration
of each phase of the shot, the number of gaze behaviors made dur-
ing each shot, the type and location of gaze behaviors made during
the shot, and head movements during the different shot phases.
Vickers reported that the most significant findings of this study
were that the expert group had a longer final fixation and a longer
quiet eye, combined with an earlier fixation offset than the
near-expert group. The quiet eye, as it was then defined, was the
portion of the final fixation that started with the onset of the final
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The Quiet Eye in Sport Performance — Dalton
action of importance (movement of the hands in the shooting action
in basketball). The quiet eye was found to be longer in experts
(972 milliseconds on hits, 806 milliseconds on misses) compared
with near-experts (357 milliseconds on hits, 393 milliseconds on mis-
ses) and longer on successful shots compared with misses in experts.
The concept of the quiet eye has evolved significantly since it
was originally defined in 1996. The evolution of the quiet eye def-
inition has been driven by several factors including technology. Ini-
tially, the quiet eye was defined as the portion of the final fixation
that occurred before the onset of the critical action within 3° visual
angle. However, improvements in eye tracking technology made it
possible to measure gaze behaviors in sport with more preci-
sion and allowed for the quiet eye to be measured within 1°
rather than 3°. Furthermore, when sports such as ice hockey
were examined, researchers found that the quiet eye was pres-
ent, but it was consistently directed toward moving targets (i.e.,
skaters).24 Because the quiet eye gaze behavior was moving with
the skaters, it was not a fixation, but it was still a stable gaze behav-
ior on a target.
The quiet eye, as we now know it, has traditionally been
thought of as a single isolated fixation that occurs only once dur-
ing a period of action, immediately before the onset of a critical
action. The singularity of the quiet eye has been one of its
greatest criticisms, as there is a growing body of evidence sug-
gesting that multiple different gaze behaviors could be important
for sports performance.20,25–34 Thus, it seems that the definition
of the quiet eye is again on the verge of change. Even Vickers21 re-
cently stated that multiple quiet eye periods could exist in an ac-
tion. The evolving definition of the quiet eye clearly speaks to the
complexity of this concept.
As a singular gaze behavior, the quiet eye has been shown to
differentiate expert and nonexpert performances, as well as suc-
cessful and unsuccessful performances in a number of different
sports, including shooting, archery, hockey, volleyball, badmin-
ton, dart throwing, billiards, soccer, and tennis,17,19,21,24,35–57
in three large multisport meta-analyses,58–60 and in other areas
such as motor coordination in children,61 surgery,62–65 and law
enforcement.66 The presence of the quiet eye across so many
sports and disciplines is a strong argument in support of its im-
portance for sports performance.
Intervention studies have demonstrated that quiet eye training
leads to increased fixation durations and translates to improved
performance in various sports, including golf, basketball, soccer,
shooting, and darts44,67–80; motor coordination skills in children81–83;
and laparoscopic surgery.84 The recent multisport meta-analysis con-
ducted by Lebeau et al.59 extracted two effect sizes for quiet eye train-
ing. First, quiet eye training was found to have a large effect on quiet
eye duration, whereby trained groups demonstrated significantly lon-
ger quiet eye durations than did untrained groups, as would have been
expected because of the targeted intervention. The second effect size
Lebeau et al. found was that quiet eye training resulted in improved
performance in the trained groups compared with the untrained
groups. Lebeau et al. proposed that the enhanced performance after
quiet eye training was a by-product of the heightened focus of atten-
tion on an external cue resulting in better coordination of the motor
task. The findings of Lebeau et al. and the independent intervention
studies again present a strong argument in support of the importance
of the quiet eye in sports performance. However, the smaller effect
size noted in the translation of quiet eye training to sports performance
by Lebeau et al. also hints at the possibility that sports performance is
more complicated than the quiet eye alone would suggest.
733
 The Quiet Eye in Sport Performance — Dalton
It has been hypothesized that the quiet eye plays a role in ensur-
ing that the brain receives the visual information it needs to plan,
organize, and initiate the extensive neural networks involved in mo-
tor control tasks.21 The quiet eye has been suggested to represent
optimal visual attentional control,70,71 whereby longer quiet eye
periods are thought to give performers more time to program their
movements while minimizing distractions from other environmen-
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tal or emotional triggers.17,18,23 Electroencephalographic studies,
demonstrating a harmonization of brain activity during the quiet
eye period, support the theory that the quiet eye represents optimal
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visual attention control.37,38,47,85–87 However, several other theo-
ries, including attentional control theory,36,46,88 dorsal and ventral
stream processing,89,90 and the inhibition hypothesis,56,91 have
also been proposed to explain how the quiet eye could enhance
visual-motor skills and sports performance. Although the quiet
eye's underlying mechanism is not yet understood, there certainly
seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting its
importance in performance.
Despite the seemingly impressive support for the importance of
the quiet eye in sports performance, the quiet eye is not without its
limitations. The definition of quite eye itself, to some extent at
least, has been constrained by the technological capabilities of
commercially available gaze trackers and gaze analysis programs.
Furthermore, there is a significant amount of research demonstrat-
ing other aspects of athletes' vision strategies are important for per-
formance and should be taken into consideration.
Historically, gaze behavior analysis has been done manually,
whereby videos are analyzed frame by frame and gaze behaviors
are coded by an observer.92 This method is both time-consuming
and complicated by the fact that individuals coding the data rely
on the accuracy of the fixation point recorded in the video produced
by the gaze tracking software, which can be as large as 1° in size.
Furthermore, fixations that are between 1 and 3° in size may con-
sist of fixations and other types of gaze behaviors, such as pursuits,
small saccades, or microsacccades.20,26 The combination of gaze
behaviors that are possible, within the region of interest that is
the quiet eye fixation, may be strategically important, yet are pres-
ently not characterized.20
Moreover, most of the commercially available gaze trackers are
only monocular, whereas most sports are played binocularly. Pre-
liminary work with a binocular eye tracker, done by Dalton26 and
Dalton et al.,93 found that professional golfers with a dominant
eye had longer fixations and higher putting success than did profes-
sional golfers without a dominant eye. Interestingly, no difference in
the distribution of handedness or ocular dominance between elite
and amateur golfers was found.93 The findings of Dalton and Dalton
et al. suggest that there may be a relationship between ocular dom-
inance and the duration of the quiet eye, but more research in this
area is needed. Binocular visual functions such as depth percep-
tion94 and ocular dominance95 are thought to be important for per-
formance in many sports, although the role of ocular dominance in
sports performance is more heavily contested. If relationships be-
tween binocular vision functions and gaze behaviors do exist, they
could provide additional insight into the role of gaze behaviors and
vision strategy in sports performance.
There is a substantial amount of recent research demonstrating
that the optimal timing of the quiet eye (early or late) varies across
tasks. For example, Klostermann et al.57 studied intermediate and
highly skilled basketball players in defended and undefended
game situations and found that an earlier quiet eye fixation onset
was linked to success. Conversely, Vine et al.45 found that a later
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fixation was important for golf putting performance. More specifi-
cally, Vine et al. found that, when larger proportions of the quite
eye occurred after putter-ball contact (“quiet eye dwell” time), ath-
letes performed better. The debate about optimal timing of the
quiet eye is perhaps most pronounced in the sport of basketball.
Vickers et al.,21,79 Vickers,23,96 Wilson et al.,46 and Harle and
Vickers68 have demonstrated that an earlier quiet eye period is im-
portant for successful performance, whereas Oudejans et al.69,97
and de Oliveira et al.98–100 have argued that late looking is important
for sports performance, and Moeinirad et al.101 have suggested that
both early and late quiet eye durations are longer in expert basketball
players compared with nonexperts.
Oudejans et al.69,97 and de Oliveira et al.98–100 have approached
the study of gaze behaviors in basketball from an ecological ap-
proach. The ecological approach is based on the theory that athletes
rely on optic flow fields to identify and perceive the affordances in
their environments in real time and then use this information to orga-
nize their movements. Although less commonly used to study gaze
behaviors in sport, research conducted using the ecological ap-
proach has demonstrated that time-to-contact information obtained
through optic flow fields was sufficient to guide motor behaviors.102,103
These results would suggest that, perhaps, the relationships be-
tween gaze behaviors in sport are more complex than they might
initially seem.
More recently, there has been an increase in research suggest-
ing that quiet eye duration does not always correlate with better
task performance and task complexity influences quiet eye dura-
tion in both novice and expert performers.20,25,104–107 This re-
search further supports the possibility that the quiet eye may play
a different role in sports performance than originally thought.
Van Lier et al.25 conducted a study to examine the effects of
slope on gaze in golf putting with 12 high-skilled professionals di-
vided into two groups (high and low skills) based on their success
on a putting task. Both groups of golfers completed putts on greens
of variable slopes while wearing a gaze tracker. No differences in
the final ball fixation duration (equivalent to the quiet eye) or the fi-
nal hole fixation were found between the skill groups on successful
and missed putts or the different slope conditions. Differences
were found between successful and missed putts overall in the dif-
ferent slope conditions, though. On the most challenging slope,
golfers had a shorter quiet eye, spending significantly less time
viewing the ball and more time viewing the slope, suggesting that
the golfers modified their visual search behavior according to the
task conditions.
Horn et al.104 studied the impact of training dart throwing with
variable and predictable target presentation patterns and found
that individuals who trained using variable targets had significantly
longer quiet eyes than individuals who trained using predictable
targets. Interestingly though, performance accuracy was not differ-
ent between the two training groups despite the variable target
training group having a longer quiet eye duration. Based on these
findings, Horn et al. suggested that the quiet eye may be related
to the programming demands of a specific task rather than simply
a factor mediating accuracy by minimizing distractions. More re-
cently, Horn and Marchetto105 demonstrated that quiet eye du-
ration was shorter when targets were precisely precued, again
suggesting that quiet eye duration may be related to program-
ming demands on specific tasks.
In a novel study conducted by Klostermann et al., the duration of
the quiet eye was experimentally manipulated during a throwing
task. During the task, the target was presented with different timings
734
 The Quiet Eye in Sport Performance — Dalton

(short and long) at different locations (random and predictable)
while the throwing movement was occurring. This design allowed re-
searchers to modify the duration of the last fixation and the amount
of information available to be processed by the participants on each
trial. Klostermann et al.106 found that longer quiet eye durations
were associated with performance but only on tasks with the highest
information processing load. On tasks that were more predictable,
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from the target earlier in the final shot phase compared with nov-
ices. Most recently, Vickers21 examined five different quiet eye pe-
riods in defended and undefended basketball 3-point shots and
found that shooting accuracy was enhanced when an early quiet
eye offset occurred before receiving the pass, an early saccade
was made to the target (the hoop), and a longer quiet eye fixation
directed toward the center of the hoop occurred during arm flexion.

the effect of quiet eye duration was no longer apparent. Using a Vickers21 went on to state that it was never intended for just one
similar experimental paradigm, Klostermann et al.107 again dem- quiet eye period to be considered during a movement; rather,
onstrated that the quiet eye was only associated with performance movements could contain multiple quiet eye periods, and each
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enhancement in the conditions that required the most visual
processing.
As mentioned earlier, much of the traditional quiet eye research
conducted to date has focused on a singular gaze behavior, despite
a growing body of research suggesting that other gaze behaviors
may equally play critical roles in performance.20 However, the idea
of multiple quiet eyes or multiple gaze behavior differences is not
new. In her original research article on golf, Vickers22 actually ex-
amined a number of different gaze behaviors throughout the putt
and found that, in addition to having a longer quiet eye period, ex-
pert golfers spent more time looking at the ball than the hole, and
they more express saccades to shift their gaze between the ball
and the hole faster than amateurs. Van Lier et al.,25 Dalton,26
and Naito et al.27 also found that the gaze behaviors associated
with putting success were much more complicated than the quiet
eye alone could explain.
Likewise, research in both soccer and tennis has shown that ex-
pert and novices demonstrate multiple different gaze parameters,
including relatively more or less fixations, which are located at dif-
ferent places in the visual scene, at different time points in the
action,28–32 and in some instances, no differences in expert-novice
gaze behaviors were found, suggesting a possible difference in visual
perception between these groups instead.33,34
In her first basketball article, Vickers16 examined several differ-
ent gaze and head movement behaviors as well. Experts were found
to have a longer final fixation, a longer quiet eye fixation, and a lon-
ger quiet eye offset. The quiet eye offset was defined as the dura-
tion of time from the end of the quiet eye to the release of the
ball, and a longer quiet eye offset meant that experts looked away
one of those periods should be isolated and examined in more de-
tail to determine which quiet eye periods were associated with
higher performance.
When we consider of all the research on the quiet eye that has
been published over the past four decades, where does that leave
us? The quiet eye certainly seems to be important for sports perfor-
mance, and yet, equally, other aspects of athlete's vision strategies
also seem to be important for sports performance. Klostermann
and Moeinirad60 recently completed a third meta-analysis investi-
gating gaze behavior differences, including fixation durations and
locations, the total number of fixations, and quiet eye duration in
expert and novice performers. Gaze location and quiet eye duration
were again found to be different in expert performers compared
with novice performers. However, in the analysis of fixation dura-
tions and fixation locations, a very different pattern emerged; there
were more studies that found nonsignificant differences between
experts and novices compared with studies that found significant
positive or negative results. Klostermann and Moeinirad also con-
ducted a publication analysis that demonstrated that the empirical
evidence for general differences in gaze behavior between experts
and novices has declined in recent years. Based on their findings,
Klostermann and Moeinirad cautioned against assuming that a dis-
tinct difference is capable of differentiating performance expertise;
instead, perceptual-cognitive expertise differences should be as-
sumed to be the result of expert perceptual performance. There-
fore, although there certainly seem to be differences in athlete's
visual performance that appear to be related to their vision strate-
gies, we still have much to learn. It seems the quiet eye is only
the beginning.

ARTICLE INFORMATION
Submitted: November 8, 2020
Accepted: March 7, 2021
Funding/Support: The author has reported no funding/support.
Conflict of Interest Disclosure: The author does not have
reported a financial conflict of interest.
Author Contributions: The author confirms sole responsibility
for this work.
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