What the quiet eye tells the quiet brain: Linking perception and action | all about performance
At the very basics, the game is about throwing table tennis balls at a distance into cups filled with beer. Each of the two facing teams has a set of cups by their side of the table. Once you center one of the other team’s cups, your opponents have to drink that cup. You win when you hit all cups so that the other team doesn’t have anything left to drink. As far as I understood, two main skills are equally important for succeeding at this game: alcohol resistance and good aiming. If you need to get better at the first one definitely don’t ask me – I rather have some tips for improving your aiming skills.
Our brain is made such that whichever visual projection falls in the fovea (the center of the retina) gets processed in a privileged way (Azzopardi & Cowey, 1993) – which basically means that we normally pay more attention to the things we are looking at. Gaze behaviour is indeed one of the mechanisms through which we orient our attention (namely, overt visuo-spatial attention; Posner, 1980). Being able to look at what really matters at the right time is then an important skill in every aiming movement, such as throwing table tennis balls into beer cups as well as golf putting or basketball free throws.
One of the differences between expert and novice aimers is indeed in their gaze pattern. First of all, during movement preparation novices look at many (more or less relevant) things while experts tend to look just at the target of the aiming movement. Besides, the final look at the target lasts longer in experts than in novices. This last fixation prior to the execution of the movement – which has been given the fancy name of quiet eye – seems to be quite crucial since motor planning occurs right at this time and several parameters such as movement direction, force, velocity, coordination and timing get processed (Vickers, 1996).
