The Quiet Eye in Winning Athletics
Why elite fencers succeed in a sport where decisions are made in milliseconds.
Updated May 25, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Why do elite fencers succeed in a sport where decisions must be made in milliseconds? A new study published in Cortex suggests the secret isn't just faster reflexes—it’s also a visual and neural phenomenon known as the quiet eye.
The authors describe how the eyes remain on target before offensive moves, seeming to aid the brain's ability to filter out noise under pressure. The study by Andrada Vincze and associates, Relationships between gaze behavior and fencing performance of high-skilled fencing athletes, used eye-tracking technology on national-level fencers to show that successful "touches" were preceded by significantly longer final visual fixations compared with unsuccessful ones.
The Quiet Eye Effect: The advantage of a long-duration final fixation of gaze on a target before movement begins has been associated with self-paced tasks like sinking a golf putt or shooting a basketball free throw, but this study extends such an advantage to the fast-moving competitive sport of fencing. The study shows that elite fencers exhibited a longer quiet-eye period (the final fixation on a target) before a successful offensive move than on an unsuccessful one. The authors previously described related findings in table tennis , where they recorded fixations on the opposing side or a narrow part of the table.
Offense Versus Defense: In everyday life, the eyes tend to jump from fixating or pausing on one point to another as they scan the environment . These rapid eye movements are termed saccades, parts of saccadic eye movement. In the fencing study, the authors found a higher number of fixations when defending versus a singular focus during offense.
Everyday Application: This gaze behavior might apply to other perceptual-motor tasks under pressure, from tennis and pickleball to driving on a crowded city street. For example, in tennis, top pro Roger Federer was known for keeping his eye and head on the ball as it struck and rebounded from his racket. The phenomenon has also been investigated as a function of expert performance in minimally invasive surgery and surgical training.
Professor Joan Vickers originated the quiet eye theory in the 1980s. She analyzed the gaze behavior of national-level basketball players during free throws and reported that expert players kept a longer final fixation before beginning their movements compared with non-expert players.
She later described this gaze behavior as final fixation or tracking gaze fixated within a 3-degree visual angle and at a specific target in the environment, which lasted 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second) or more. This research area went on to explore the applications of coaching or training aimed at enhancing performance in areas as diverse as sports and surgery.
Limitations . The studies of gaze behavior during fencing and table tennis involved a limited number of selected participants, though it does extend previous studies of gaze behavior in other sports. Differences in the length of eye fixations were a matter of degree rather than all-or-none. How such narrow gaze behavior might coexist with the situational awareness provided by peripheral vision that covers a wide angle might be a topic for future consideration. In baseball or soccer, for example, players can use their peripheral vision to get an overview of the whole playing field without turning their heads
Saccadic eye movement is controlled by the frontal eye field in the frontal lobe of the brain in conjunction with other regions. How the brain connects visual behavior with the skilled movements that follow it was not a topic of this study, but visual focus on a target could improve visual attention while resisting distractions, and then planning and performing a skilled movement. Other neuroscience studies have highlighted the Dorsal Attention Network within the brain, including the frontal eye field and regions of the parietal lobe, as a bridge between visual processing and motor performance.
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Robert A. Lavine, PhD is a clinical psychologist, GWU School of Medicine Adjunct Assoc. Professor, writer for The Atlantic , and author of How the Brain Connects to Cognitive & Behavioral Change .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.