Neuroscience, Expert Gunfighters, and the Quiet Eye

Watching an expert shooter is like watching an artist.  You may not be able to do it, but you can recognize art when you see it.  Thanks to the internet we have an abundance of examples of very good shooters both in the tactical world and on the competition stage, but what defines their expertise?  Are they more athletic than us?  Do they have better genes? Or is it their $9000 dollar custom guns.  The answer is NO, NO and give me their gun so I can find out.  The real difference between experts in almost any high skill athletic field is their quiet eye. What’s the quiet eye you say?  Keep reading to find out.

The Quiet Eye

The quiet eye is defined as ‘the final fixation on a location that is within 3ᵒ of visual angle for a minimum of 100ms’ (Vickers, 1996). In layman’s terms, this is the final settling of your gaze just prior to the final action you take.  In free throw shooting, this would be staring at the rim as you raise the ball to shoot.  In the tactical realm, this might be staring at the suspect’s weapon as you draw your weapon, ready to fire.

Quiet eye has been studied for years in the sports arena and only recently has it made the jump into the tactical world.  It has long been a predictor of mastery in any given sporting event. A recent meta-analysis, by Mann, Williams, and Ward (2007), found that a longer quiet eye duration was one of three predictors of perceptual-motor expertise. In every motor task there appears to be a crucial moment when the individual must fixate or track specific task information and this must occur before a critical final movement is made.  You can think of this in terms of little league coaching advice.  Keep your eye on the ball.  Ok, now that we know what quiet eye is, how does it apply to gunfighting?  This very issue was investigated in a recent study by Force Sciences Institute .

They designed a study where they compared two groups of police officers in a use of force scenario, while tracking their gaze behavior.  There were 11 male members of the department’s Emergency Response Team and 13 rookies who had just graduated from their police academy.  They were given glasses that were able to track their gaze during the trial.

The scenario was as follows: The assailant entered from a side door and approached a receptionist, who was seated at a desk 7 m from where the officer on duty was standing guard over the entrance to a government office. Upon reaching the desk, he turned his back to the officer and complained to the receptionist that he had been unjustly jailed for the past three days. He requested a meeting with an official so that he could get his passport back. The receptionist was polite, but not helpful, leading the man to become increasingly agitated.

During the final seven seconds, the scenario escalated with the assailant slamming his hands on the table and angrily raising his voice. Suddenly, with two seconds remaining in the scenario, he reached for a handgun (or cell phone) from under his coat with his right hand, executed a rapid reverse pivot and shot at the officer, or brandished the cell phone in such a way he appeared to shoot. Each participant had 7 trials, 5 with a gun, 2 with a cell phone.  During each of these trials, data was recorded on their vision and the time it took each officer to proceed through draw to engaging the assailant with their simunitions handgun.

Results

As you might expect, the Emergency Response Team officers did better than the rookies, but they did better in unexpected ways.  Expert officers hit their target 75% of the time with the rookies at 54%.  More importantly, 18% of expert officers shot at the assailant when he brandished a cell phone, where as 62% of rookies incorrectly shot the assailant.

In terms of firing speed, the expert officers fired before the assailant on 93% of trials compared to 42% for the rookies (bad day for rookies). They were also faster than the assailant by an average of 179.05 ms  and the rookies were slower than the experts by an average of 13.26 ms.  The expert officers hit the assailant in the upper torso (62%), the arms/hands (31%) and legs (7%). Respective percentages for the rookies were upper torso (48%), arms/hands (35%), legs (6%) and head (9%).

The most telling difference between the rookies and the experts was their visual location.  Expert officers focused their vision on areas where weapons were likely to be found, where as rookies scanned the general area, often times looking off target completely.  This visual difference, based on expertise, was hugely important as it allowed experienced officers to track their assailant more accurately for a longer duration, effectively giving their brain more time to process threat info.

Consequently, the expert officers were only slightly faster on the draw, but, had their gun out much earlier in the scenario.  The rookies drew their gun too late, and consequently had less time to aim and fire.  More devastatingly, the expert officer’s quiet eye was fixated on the assailant’s gun throughout the firing sequence, whereas the rookie’s went from the gun to their own gun 84% of time, prior to firing.  The rookies were interrupting the most crucial phase of the action, by taking their eye off target. In fact 50% of the time, the rookies took their eyes off the assailant completely as they fired.

Implications for Training

This scenario was a rough one for the rookies.  They shot the wrong person much of the time, and were killed 58% of the time, when they should have shot.  This isn’t even the scariest part.  These rookies are much better trained in use of force than the majority of military members and the vast majority of civilians.

I know you guys will scream and holler untrue, false, but it is a fact.  Most civilians never go through a rigorous qualification process and most folks in the military are not combat arms specialties.  Of those combat arms members, use of force is not emphasized as much as unit tactics and shooting accuracy.  Yes, there are military members that are good at these scenarios, but they are the tip of the spear not the shaft.

 

Given these abysmal results, what should we do to improve our chances in a gunfight?  The first thing you can do to make a big difference, is gain experience.  You’ll remember that expert officers did much better in all trials, as they should.  SWAT officers often practice shoot don’t shoot scenarios.  Furthermore, they know what types of body language and verbal language presage an attack.  The single best way to gain experience is to practice with simunitions.

In another recent study, researchers found that training groups, against realistic opponents who could fire back, mitigated the decrease in accuracy such a stressful situation causes.  What’s more, this effect lasted many months after the initial testing and training against these opponents.  If you carry a weapon, you should participate in force on force training!  I promise you, no matter how good you are at punching holes in paper, you are not that good against an opponent.

My second recommendation has to do with changing the way firearm aiming is done in a real world environment.  If you’ll notice, from the above listed study, most of the rookies took their eyes off their opponent, whereas the experts did not.  The difference is in their training.  Expert shooters bring the pistol up to their line of sight, and know they have the correct sight alignment, without shifting their quiet eye away from the threat.  Rookies are bringing their weapon up, then shifting to their front sight, taking their gaze off of the enemy, interrupting their quiet eye and ruining their chance of success.

Currently, we teach a very heavy front sight focus, because that produces accurate shots. Unfortunately, accurate shots are not the only requisite in a gun fight.  We must train some of the time in the standard manner, with a front sight focus.  This is a basic fundamental skill to produce accurate shots just like a slow and deliberate trigger press is also a fundamental that must be mastered.  Once we master these, and are able to do these two things without conscious thought, we need to start working on shooting without refocusing on our front sight, just as we work on more rapid shot strings.  This is not point shooting.  We are still aware of our front sight in relation to the rear sight, we just maintain our focus on the enemy while firing.

Anecdotally, I can tell you this happens for me automatically.  Every time I do force on force training, I never recall seeing my front sights.  I believe this happens because it is not something my brain has to focus on consciously, which allows me to maintain my quiet eye on the target.  So far, I have had good success with this method and it seems very natural for me.  I don’t think I could train myself not to focus on a threat weapon even if I tried.

Conclusions

This article has been relatively heavy on scientific studies and neuroscience, so let’s recap.  We now know that quiet eye is incredibly important for expert level performance.  We also know that it is what separates rookies from experts and it can have drastic real world implications for those who carry a gun.  The fundamentals of shooting must first be mastered, so we no longer have to think about them.  At that point, we can work on developing our quiet eye, by maintaining a target oriented fixation in the last moments of the shot.  We can best practice this high level skill, by seeking out force on force training.  Remember, this is a skill that must be mastered to become an expert, not some trick that will give you their level of skill.  Work the fundamentals until you can’t think of getting them wrong, then learn to master the quiet eye.