Quiet eye in golf leads to better performance

Of all the gaze within the scan path in golf (fixations, saccades, pursuit tracking) to all locations (ball, club, hole, green), only one has emerged as an indicator of both higher levels of skill and accuracy, and that is the final fixation on the ball prior to the backswing (Vickers, 1992; Vickers, 2004; Vickers, Morton, & Panchuk, in progress). Figure 6.4 (top) shows that golfers with handicaps below 4 have a mean quiet-eye duration of 2 s, while those with handicaps above 14 average 1.5 s (Vickers, 1992). Figure 6.4 (bottom) shows the quiet-eye duration of professional and novice members of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) who performed putts of 3 m on a sloped green (Vickers & Crews, 2002). In both studies, the onset of the quiet eye occurred before the backswing, and it was located on either the back of the ball or the top.