The racer's gaze: Visual strategy in high-speed sports expertise

Eye movements shape all visual input to the brain, making their understanding essential for studying perception and visual guidance in dynamic environments. Research on expert performance indicates that gaze coordination is a key feature of expertise in, for example, sports. Mobile eye tracking provides the opportunity to investigate gaze strategies supporting the skilled actions of an athlete and can deliver insight into the underlying perceptual-cognitive processes. We systematically observed the visual strategy of an expert racing driver performing a domain-representative task. Synchronized gaze, telemetry, and localization data from a high-grade simulator were analyzed to address four classes of research questions: oculomotor, scene analysis, timing, and point of vantage. The results (a) replicate the seminal tangent point orientation (pre-turn-in saccades), (b) describe both the oculomotor signature and timing signature of the steering with the head strategy, (c) identify a novel saccade strategy (pre-full-throttle saccades), and (d) reveal a previously unstudied spatial regularity in the serial organization of behavior: a tight localization of the points of vantage where the pre-turn-in saccades and pre-full-throttle saccades are made. The gaze strategies are not tied to specifics of the task and may be relevant for understanding expert performance in other fields with similar visuomotor and cognitive demands. The method of cross-examining an integrated dataset by multiple parametrizations itself complements traditional research designs with predefined task constraints and restrictions. We are not aware of any study that has simultaneously addressed all four kinds of research questions simultaneously.