Multifractality in postural sway supports quiet eye training in aiming tasks: A study of golf putting

The quiet eye (QE) approach to visually-guided aiming behavior invests fully in perceptual informations potential to organize coordinated action. Sports psychologists refer to QE as the stillness of the eyes during aiming tasks and increasingly into self- and externally-paced tasks. Amidst the noisy fluctuations of the athletes body, quiet eyes might leave fewer saccadic interruptions to the coupling between postural sway and optic flow. Postural sway exhibits fluctuations whose multifractal structure serves as a robust predictor of visual and haptic perceptual responses. Postural sway generates optic flow centered on an individuals eye height. We predicted that perturbing the eye height by attaching wooden blocks below the feet would perturb the putting more so in QE-trained participants than participants trained technically. We also predicted that QEs efficacy and responses to perturbation would depend on multifractality in postural sway. Specifically, we predicted that less multifractality would predict more adaptive responses to the perturbation and higher putting accuracy. Results showed that lower multifractality led to more accurate putts, and the perturbation of eye height led to less accurate putts, particularly for QE-trained participants. Models of radial error (i.e., the distance between the balls final position and the hole) indicated that lower estimates of multifractality due to nonlinearity coincided with a more adaptive response to the perturbation. These results suggest that reduced multifractality may act in a context-sensitive manner to restrain motoric degrees of freedom to achieve the task goal.