EYES ON THE PRIZE

A strange visual trick can speed up learning and boost performance

- by IAN TAYLOR

Take a look at the image on the page here. Weird, right? It looks like the pattern is rotating, especially when it's in your peripheral vision, or when your eyes make tiny movements over the picture.

Now look again, and this time try to steady your gaze. Fix your vision at a set point and try not to move your eyes. Two things will happen: the illusion should stop moving and, when it does, you'll have successfully completed your first session of 'quiet eye' training. Congratulations!

You may be wondering what the point of that exercise was. Well, quiet eye training is a potent, fast-track way to improve different motor skills. Sportspeople, surgeons, soldiers and pilots all use it to hone their abilities. It works by exploiting the way people control their eyes in order to guide a physical action, like a golf putt or a penalty kick at the European football championships this summer (no pressure, ladies...).

"There's a period of time that occurs immediately before the critical movement of the skill in which essentially the eyes shut down," says Prof Sam Vine, a researcher at the University of Exeter. "They become extremely 'quiet"."