Shhh… We're talking about the Quiet Eye! A Perceptual Approach to the Transfer of Skill: Quiet Eye as an Insight into Perception-Action Coupling in Elite Football Goalkeepers – Methodological and Feasibility Considerations (original) (raw)

2017, Scientific Conference on Motor Skill Acquisition: Methodologies to Enhance Sport Performance and Athlete Development - Integration of Research and Practice.

There is a requirement to view the QE beyond an isolated and interventionist approach, for which the QE could become used as a key perceptual tool to measure the transfer of skill from training to competitive performance (Reinhoff et al., 2015; Davids & Araujo, 2016). Approaching the design of research practices for the study of perception must be categorised under a key experimental research principle. Originally introduced by Egon Brunswik (1956), representative design advocates for the dynamics of any experimental task must host some reciprocity with that of the natural task constraints present. Adopting a probabilistic functionalism perspective will provide the necessary scope of analysis towards QE behaviour under principles of Ecological Dynamics (Brunswik, 1956; Pinder, 2011). Due to the nature of information in complex environments being variable and emergent, practice and training conditions must illustrate a field of affordances that creates opportunities for relative game like actions to occur (Bruinberg and Rietveld, 2014). This study attempts to view the QE under conditions rich in variability, and in which truly replicate the natural performance conditions of the studied task. Through this, it allows the versatility of the QE to be stretched further towards the design of sporting training environments that can replicate the visual energy arrays available in performance conditions (Vickers, 2006). Williams, Janelle and Davids (2004) discussed how there may be benefit in understanding visual search by way of the interacting constraints that shape emergent behaviour. Key observations were raised by Davids and Araujo (2016), in an interesting commentary presented by the authors, they questioned the QE scope, voicing concerns that the QE has become the simple answer in understanding decision making. A vast amount of the QE literature has utilised QE as a tool for perceptual training in sport. For example, QE training interventions have been used in an attempt to train the visual search strategies of non-experts within similar tasks used by their expert counterparts. Harle and Vickers (2001) study demonstrated the potential of QE based training interventions for which significant improvements were noticed during free throw simulations and into games, this is further supported by Schmidt and Lee (1999) whom used a 6-week intervention with volleyball players, for which improvements in gaze durations were noted. Causer, Holmes and Williams (2011) again employed a training intervention to demonstrate the use of QE as a tool for perceptual training, yet there are numerous concerns cited across the literature. Questions are still raised over the legitimacy of QE training interventions, as Causer (2016) suggested in his commentary to Vickers (2016) that there are limited trials and short retention periods across a number of training interventions. It is clear from the literature that the design of training methodologies employed has been given little thought. Resulting in isolated intervention based training methodologies. It is worth noting that often the trials are isolated incidents of performance, with the tasks often being non-representative of the constraints that would occur in the natural task setting (Reinhoff et al.. 2015). Whilst there is great depth in QE research, performance environments are littered with interacting constraints which shape emergent behaviour, yet the role of interacting constraints has been limited in the design of research tasks for study of the QE. Reinhoff et al (2015) search found just 51 studies dedicated towards understanding the impact of constraints on QE, however, a vast proportion of this branch of research has highlighted the resultant gaze behaviour from the interacting constraints compared across trials and individual, rather than the process to which gaze is attuned because of the environments that shape their actions.