Effect of narrowing the base of support on the gait, gaze and quiet eye of elite ballet dancers and controls

Abstract

We determined the gaze and stepping behaviours of elite ballet dancers and controls as they walked normally and along progressively narrower 3-m lines (l0.0, 2.5 cm). The ballet dancers delayed the first step and then stepped more quickly through the approach area and onto the lines, which they exited more slowly than the controls, which stepped immediately but then slowed their gait to navigate the line, which they exited faster. Contrary to predictions, the ballet group did not step more precisely, perhaps due to the unique anatomical requirements of ballet dance and/or due to releasing the degrees of freedom under their feet as they fixated ahead more than the controls. The ballet group used significantly fewer fixations of longer duration, and their final quiet eye (QE) duration prior to stepping on the line was significantly longer (2,353.39 ms) than the controls (1,327.64 ms). The control group favoured a proximal gaze strategy allocating 73.33% of their QE fixations to the line/off the line and 26.66% to the exit/visual straight ahead (VSA), while the ballet group favoured a 'look-ahead' strategy allocating 55.49% of their QE fixations to the exit/VSA and 44.51% on the line/off the line. The results are discussed in the light of the development of expertise and the enhanced role of fixations and visual attention when more tasks become more constrained.

Visuomotor Control of Human Adaptive Locomotion: Understanding the Anticipatory Nature

“…By foveating the door edges, the participants were better able to attend to the doors’ positions, while short fixation durations allowed the participants to process each door’s location more frequently. The differences in spatio-temporal patterns of fixation while walking or using a wheelchair seem to be similar to those between elite and non-elite athletes (Kato and Fukuda, 2002; Martell and Vickers, 2004; Nagano et al, 2004; Panchuk and Vickers, 2011), in that non-elite participants showed shorter fixation and more frequent saccades at critical moments.…”

The quiet eye without a target: The primacy of visual information processing.

“…Drawing on the postural-stability approach (cf. Panchuk & Vickers, 2011; Rienhoff et al, 2012), performance-enhancing effects should be found as a function of final-fixation onset only, with an earlier fixation onset due to the longer period of postural stabilization, resulting in better performance. In contrast, drawing on the optimized movement parameterization approach, two other result patterns could be predicted, namely, (a) a main effect for target onset with an earlier target onset due to the increase in visual processing time, resulting in better performance.…”

“…These results lead the authors to the conclusion that the functionality of the QE might be less rooted in information processing. Instead, Rienhoff et al (2012)—because direct measures of postural stability were not applied—speculated that the QE might optimize postural control by linking eye to head and body movements (see also Panchuk & Vickers, 2011).…”

“…In addition to the dependent measures used in Experiment 1, a further manipulation check for controlling effects of the fixation-onset and target-onset manipulation on postural stability was introduced in order to directly test the alternative explanation of QE effects offered by the postural-stability hypothesis (cf. Panchuk & Vickers, 2011; Rienhoff et al, 2012). Due to multiple opportunities in the human body to mutually compensate for variance in different posture-related variables (e.g., Winter, 1995), a closely QE-related measure, the overall stability of the head, was favored over other measures that, for instance, can be derived from force-platform recordings (e.g., sway, see Diener, Dichgans, Bacher, & Gompf, 1984).…”

From Traditional Sport to Esports: Leveraging Perceptual Research to Accelerate Skill Development

“…Quiet Eye is specified by the final visual fixation or tracking gaze on a specific location or object in the performance space that lasts for a minimum of 100 ms prior to the onset of the movement action (Vickers, 1996;2007). Quiet Eye has been associated with higher levels of skill and performance in a myriad of performance activities-e.g., golf putting, stopping a hockey puck, or shooting a basketball in sport (Panchuk et al, 2014;Panchuk & Vickers, 2006;Klostermann et al, 2017), locomotion and balance (Panchuk & Vickers, 2011), precise surgical dissection in medicine (Harvey et al, 2014), rehabilitation of children with developmental coordination disorder (Miles et al, 2015), and decision making and subsequent inhibition or targeted firing of a firearm in law enforcement (Vickers & Lewinski, 2012). Quiet Eye is also sensitive to psychological factors such as anxiety and arousal in these task contexts (Vickers & Williams, 2007;Vine & Wilson, 2011).…”