When you look at training and coaching as being instead of correcting or perfecting skills and their signifiers, but as "how you learn to learn," in that domain, a quiet eye is not an objective, but rather an effect of building skills on top of a set of underlying attitudes.
Goodhart's Law has been quoted a lot here recently, (re: measure becoming target and ceasing to be good measure), but it applies here.
The more useful question is, "of what is a quiet eye the effect?"
At an elite competition level, the physical differences (and scores) between athletes are so minor that success is more an effect of psychological habits than the relative difference in diet and training regimens.
Watching very top athletes, they are usually calm and deliberate, which is the effect of being in a zone where they are not intellectualizing or reacting to events, but are instead, in a state I call accept-respond. There is a huge aspect of ego suppression they can cultivate, where the y aren't distracted by hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and in particular, expectations and anticipations for how the immediate situation plays out, which delays their ability to shorten their accept-respond loop.
The very existence of an "if this then that," thought in their mind is performance inhibiting, because even that "if," statement needs to be negated before they can respond. Bringing conditionals to the game only works when the game plays out according to that conditional at the right time. At a learning level, you can learn those conditionals as tactics, but you need to practice them to where there is no conscious selection and evaluation of them when you are performing.
IMHO, a quiet eye is the effect of how you related to your trainer/coach/parent/teacher, and it's not incumbent on the student or athlete to develop it, it is the sign of a good teacher.
There's a video where an experienced pianist's eyes were tracked and compared to a less experienced player's. The experienced person had much less eye movement and displayed what might also be called a quiet eye. Both players were already familiar with the piano piece, so there's a difference here when compared to sports where there is an element of randomness (ex. tennis - is the serve going to go left right?).
I'd be interested to see if there's a difference between the "ultimate" quiet eye in procedural tasks (piano, free throw) vs tasks that have randomness (returning a serve, saving a goal).
Perhaps one difference is in the accept-respond loop you mentioned, with the procedural tasks being able to be reduced far greater than the random tasks. Say if a random task was reduced too far, you might get something like goalkeepers jumping in the wrong direction.
> it's not incumbent on the student or athlete to develop it, it is the sign of a good teacher
Its more a sign of both - the student's willingness to adjust and the teacher's willingness to refine. The reason I say both is that you run into students that have a better chance of picking something up right away (prior experience) and others that do not. The student that does not have that prior experience still needs it in order to be successful. A good instructor knows not to only focus on the people with prior experience and help boost the latter as well.
For example, in martial arts (as I noted elsewhere), you have someone who has prior experience in body coordination, which makes it easier for them to pick up an art (or dance or a sport). A student whose never stepped on to a mat in their life still needs body coordination. While a good instructor should see that and help build that coordination, the student needs to develop motivation and discipline to do these things without the need of someone else. An out of shape student should needs to recognize they need to put in extra work to move up a level - that is something the instructor can only point out.
A great book I use as a backing to my teaching philosophy is Mastery by George Leonard[1]. It categories the different personalities of the student into Dabbler, Obsessive, and Hacker (not in a good way). Dabblers try but quit when things get hard; Obsessives consume everything possible until they start seeing diminished returns; and Hackers just kind of "show up" and steadily maintain/improve. People can be all three for different things but its handling the particular category appropriately that pushes people toward mastery.
Excellent, will check that book out. Something I've noticed in my own life is practicing mastery in one area creates learnings and attitudes that aid in mastery in another area. The actual skills are not there, but the ability to navigate the learning terrain is. Many facts I thought about myself (eg. I'm unathletic) were simply assumptions I made somewhere early on in my life, perhaps because I lacked prior experience that my peers had. Which makes me think, is talent simply unconscious prior experience?
Unless we want to go into an all night drinking philosophical discussion - I'd say its a combination of nature and nurture (though how "unconscious" is nature would be the drinking topic). There's a great article the argues that practice isn't enough [1]. It will be incredibly difficult for me to become a professional basketball player, even with practice. I'm too old, bad knees, and 5'9" (again, Mugsy Bugs was 5'3"... possible but difficult nonetheless).
I think as we become more experienced in something, we draw from that to make metaphors to another domain (no paper link, but I'm sure there a psych one out there I've yet to read). My current research is inspired by my years in martial arts. I draw analogies from it because I see the parallels to CS - poor retention rates, difficult subject matter, etc.
A long time ago I determined I was not a genius, rock star, pro athlete, whatever person. I'm just a guy that works really hard to be better than myself.
Well put. The article makes it sound like training the "quiet eye", i.e. improving eye focus by X percent, will improve elite athlete traits of calmness and zone/flow. When cause/effect operating in the opposite direction is equally (if not more) likely.
Disclaimer - I wrote the article I'm genuinely interested in your point here, but doesn't the research on quiet eye training actually support this causal link? Lots of the studies showed that feedback on the athlete's eye movements does improve their accuracy, better than control interventions that did not explicitly teach the quiet eye.
As an aside, do you know of any research where eye movement is not possible? I'm thinking of sparring in grappling, where you can't see parts of your opponent's body because you literally can't move your head that way.
> The very existence of an "if this then that," thought in their mind is performance inhibiting, because even that "if," statement needs to be negated before they can respond.
Goodhart's Law has been quoted a lot here recently, (re: measure becoming target and ceasing to be good measure), but it applies here.
The more useful question is, "of what is a quiet eye the effect?"
At an elite competition level, the physical differences (and scores) between athletes are so minor that success is more an effect of psychological habits than the relative difference in diet and training regimens.
Watching very top athletes, they are usually calm and deliberate, which is the effect of being in a zone where they are not intellectualizing or reacting to events, but are instead, in a state I call accept-respond. There is a huge aspect of ego suppression they can cultivate, where the y aren't distracted by hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and in particular, expectations and anticipations for how the immediate situation plays out, which delays their ability to shorten their accept-respond loop.
The very existence of an "if this then that," thought in their mind is performance inhibiting, because even that "if," statement needs to be negated before they can respond. Bringing conditionals to the game only works when the game plays out according to that conditional at the right time. At a learning level, you can learn those conditionals as tactics, but you need to practice them to where there is no conscious selection and evaluation of them when you are performing.
IMHO, a quiet eye is the effect of how you related to your trainer/coach/parent/teacher, and it's not incumbent on the student or athlete to develop it, it is the sign of a good teacher.