Visual characteristics of clay target shooters.

A comprehensive battery of standardised visual tests was administered to 11 skilled and 12 novice clay target shooters in an attempt to determine the distinctive visual characteristics of expert performers in this sport. The static and dynamic visual acuity, ocular muscle balance, ocular dominance, depth perception and colour vision of each of the subjects was measured in addition to their performance on simple and choice reaction time, peripheral response time, rapid tachistoscopic detection, coincidence timing and eye movement skills tasks. Expert superiority was observed on the simple reaction time measure only, and the novices actually outperformed the skilled subjects on a number of the other visual measures (viz., static acuity at near distance, dynamic acuity, vertical ocular muscle balance, choice reaction time and rapid target detection discriminability). Scores on all measures for both groups were within the expected normal range indicating that normal and not necessarily above-average basic visual functioning is sufficient to support skilled clay target shooting. An important implication of the finding that skilled shooters are not characterised by supranormal levels of basic visual functioning is the recognition that any attempt to improve shooting performance through training of general attributes of vision to supranormal levels is likely to be unproductive.