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

Amidst the continued theorising and objective epistemological approach to perceptual research (Michaels and Beek, 1995), there remains little clarity regarding what information athletes use to direct decision making in performance settings and how skill is transferred from training to performance. The role of perception-action coupling within decision-making in team sports has been discussed at great length (Vaeyens et al, 2007; Pinder et al, 2011), with some consensus being reached that skilled performers do not necessarily have superior visual ability, but that their ability to locate and interpret key specifying information determines expertise in a particular skilled actions (Vickers, 2006). The methodological accord has often been to recreate core, single action motor-control tasks in the hope of elucidating data to suggest a change in behaviour in any given number of constraint manipulations (Vickers, 1996; Williams, Singer and Frehlich, 2002; Vine and Wilson, 2011). However, research remains in isolation of the complexities of the real world (Vaeyens, 2007; Williams and Grant, 1999). The Quiet Eye (QE) has become increasingly popular (Vickers, 2016), it details the final fixation towards a specific location or object within 3* of visual angle or less for a minimum of 100m/s (Vickers, 2016). It is reasonable to suggest that QE describes the variable in which to examine the relationship between perception and action (Panchuk and Vickers, 2006). A SensoMotoric Instrument – Eye Tracking Glasses (SMI-ETG) binocular system will be employed within an elite level goalkeeping context. QE data will be collected in three different practice trial environments and compared to QE measures taken in a representative performance simulation. The practice trial environment design will be informed by principles of ecological dynamics as presented in the Environment Design Framework (Newcombe et al, in preparation). 1. To understand the gaze behaviours of elite goalkeepers in-situ to determine an optimum approach to training that represents similar gaze patterns and fixations to competitive performance through the use of SMI Eye Tracking Glasses. 2. Use the Quiet Eye as an objective measure to understand how transfer occurs between training and performance from the means of perceptual attunement.