Effects of attentional focus and cognitive load on novice dart throwing: Evidence from quiet eye duration and pupillary responses

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of attentional focus and cognitive-load on motor performance, quiet-eye-duration, and pupil dilation. 18 participants completed a dart throwing task under four conditions, internal or external focus with high or low cognitive-load. Cognitive-load was created by a secondary tone detection task. During each trial participants pupil size and eye movements were recorded along with accuracy data of the dart throw. Results revealed that decreased cognitive-load increased accuracy while high load increased pupil size (p's < 0.05). An external focus resulted in the greatest accuracy while an external focus with high cognitive-load resulted in the longest quiet-eye-durations (p's < 0.05). Based on these findings an increase in pupil size is related to greater cognitive-load but doesn't explain the improvement in task performance. Likewise, an external focus of attention improved performance but was not strongly related to quiet-eye-duration. Results are further discussed in the article.