One of my links on the previous 'skate'n'surf' post was to an academic paper on perception/decision research. A cursory scan through various of the web resources available on the topic fairly quickly brought me to the work of Joan Vickers of the University of Calgary and her work on 'Quiet Eye' as a trait of elite athletes. Considering the visuality of the subject matter, there isn't much obviously on Youtube about it, and scattered works elsewhere (generally leading to proprietory/paid subscription sites, etc). As a firm believer in a free internet, I was therefore forced back onto my own recent experiences. I'll list a few of them here, analyse them later.
The 'frozen moment' in the crease just before I scored my goal in last week's semi-final.
The 'frozen moment' of my second game of icehockey, subsequent to which I avoided crashing into someone's face.
Confirmation of the first 'frozen moment' when was talking to a goaltending friend on Wednesday night at the game and I mentioned how time had seemed to stand still, and his immediate response had been 'and then a gap of a few inches opened up for you to pop the puck in?' So, it's not an experience subject to myself only, others know of it.
Watching the A Graders scan the ice as they glided around, absorbing and deciding.
The progress of learning a skill, increasing reliance on internal feedback as the skill develops, earlier relative benefit of external feedback during early stages of skill acquisition, the importance of not overloading with feedback in the earliest stages.
The general pattern of 'quiet eye' relying on less but longer gazes to build the information bank upon which the decision reflex operates (with the almost axiomatic culmination of a 'play' being in a gaze of a second or more at the goal, and two seconds on the puck, before a shot).
The need to not scan the eye with the moving puck, once it has been 'fixed' during a gaze, it seems that a moving focus will lower the rate of information processing (the brain does best with one thing at a time when these two trade off processing space).
Training in Quiet Eye tends to use visual tracking technologies to show athletes their performance on this axis when training them up initially.
Query whether similar effect can be generated through discipline training 'in the raw'?
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