The impact of anxiety and challenge on quiet eye in tenpin bowling

Expert performers tend to have an advantage over others due to competent visual search ability, and this is particularly evident in self-paced sports where athletes have ample amount of time to go through the visual search process before taking a shot. A critical part of the visual search process is the Quiet Eye (QE), defined as the last fixation at a target prior to initiation of movement (Vickers, 2007). The purpose of this study was to investigate visual search and QE strategies during pre-movement phase between elite and sub-elite players in tenpin bowling. It was hypothesized from past research that elite would demonstrate longer visual search duration compared to the sub-elite. This study also included anxiety-inducing and perceived difficulty conditions where changes in visual search patterns and performance outcomes were predicted. Two groups of participants comprising of elite (n=11) and sub-elite (n=10) players were tested under four counterbalanced conditions: low anxiety low challenge (LALC), high anxiety low challenge (HALC), low anxiety high challenge (LAHC), and high anxiety high challenge (HAHC). The anxiety inducing condition required players to achieve a target score, while bowling on non-preferred oiling pattern was the high challenge condition. Participants threw 10 shots for each condition and wore the Dikablis Gaze Tracking System that recorded eye movement throughout the trial. Unlike past literature, elite bowlers displayed shorter visual search duration and lesser fixations compared to the sub-elite. Shorter QE duration was found for successful compared to unsuccessful shots in elite bowlers, but the opposite for sub-elite.Bachelor of Science (Sport Science and Management