The development of sophisticated eye tracking
technology in the 20th century has allowed scientists to
begin objectively to understand the nature of eye movements
and their relationship to behavior. In sport, the
first eye tracking studies were conducted in the 1970s,
but advances in technology, which have increased the
mobility and flexibility of eye tracking devices, have
allowed researchers to probe deeper into how gaze
behavior relates to sporting performance (Vickers,
2007).
Research in sport typically adopts mobile eye trackers—
worn on the head like a pair of glasses. These
glasses contain a camera pointing forward to record the
scene that the performer is seeing, and either one or
two cameras recording eye movements. Light-emitting
diodes (LED) project a low-intensity, near infrared (IR)
light onto the eye that is reflected by the cornea as a
glint. The pupil appears black, as light does not exit the
inside of the eye, enabling the system to register its
position and determine its center. During eye movements,
the center of the pupil moves relative to the
head while the corneal reflection remains in the same
position. By calibrating the eye-tracker—asking the
performer to fixate on known landmarks in the visual
field—the eye-tracker software can translate the vector
(angle and distance) between the pupil center and the
corneal reflection into a point of gaze in the scene (see
Panchuk, Vine, & Vickers, 2015, for a detailed review).
The underlying rationale that drives the study of eye
tracking in sport is the proposed interdependence
between eye movements and attention and their role in
supporting skilled performance (Panchuk et al., 2015).
For example, eye movement studies enable us to gain
an insight into perceptual-cognitive differences between
expert and novice performers; how changes to information
processing occur as skills are acquired; and how
breakdowns in performance might be due to suboptimal
attention. Information about how experts move their
eyes when performing a sport skill can also be used to
develop training programs for less skilled performers
(Wilson, Causer, & Vickers, 2015).
