Dynamical accommodation of overt attention, accuracy and time in modern pentathlon athletes during laser-run shooting

Many sports require athletes to dynamically control their visual attention to achieve optimal performance, especially when under time-pressure. In this real-world eye-tracking study, we uncover the interplay between attention and performance in 11 Modern Pentathlon elite athletes of the Italian National Team during "Laser Run", which requires athletes to achieve five valid shots in four series. In real competitions, following each series, athletes complete a run, which forces them to trade-off accuracy (how well they hit the target) and time (how fast they shoot). In this study, athletes completed five blocks of four shootings series. Fixations acquired with a Tobii Pro Glasses 2 were time-locked to each critical shoot (when the trigger was pulled) and considered only if occurring within a single or spanning across multiple shoots. While we found that higher accuracy and longer fixations increase the time to complete a shoot, elite athletes learn to dynamically adjust this trade-off between attention and accuracy across the shooting blocks, so significantly reducing their overall timings too. Our results show a direct relationship between eye movement and performance in terms of timing and accuracy, emphasizing the necessity for attention to dynamically accommodate motor-actions in time-limited sport activities.