Researchers Find Runners Improve Performance by Narrowing Visual Focus

A Rutgers professor and others show that zooming in on the finish line – rather than taking in surroundings – bolsters both effort and pace

A simple way for runners who want to enhance their performance is to focus on the finish line rather than taking in their surroundings, a recent study has found

A team of psychology researchers at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, New York University and Creighton University, who investigated nearly 1,600 runners, call it “narrowing one’s visual attention.”

In an investigation of nearly 1,600 runners, scientists found that narrowing visual attention – zooming in on the finish line rather than taking in the surroundings – serves as a powerful self-regulation strategy that can boost both effort and performance.

The findings offer a low-cost and simple way to improve running performance—merely by adjusting how we direct our attention.

Shana Cole

Associate Professor, Psychology, Rutgers-New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences

“The findings offer a low-cost and simple way to improve running performance—merely by adjusting how we direct our attention,” said Shana Cole, an associate professor of psychology in the Rutgers-New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences and an author of the study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The researchers said this type of focus, which they label “attentional narrowing,” constitutes a well-honed plan: Expert athletes and faster runners use this narrowing approach more than novices or slower runners.

“Looking at one spot ahead of you – rather than around you – can help you keep going,” said Emily Balcetis, an associate professor of psychology at New York University and the lead author of the paper. “By increasingly narrowing attention as a runner moves from earlier to later stages of a run or race – like locking in on a target, then finding another after you pass the first, and eventually the finish line – they run faster, raise their heart rate and perform better.”

The paper centers six studies that included both surveys of elite and casual runners to assess their running approaches as well as experiments to validate the survey responses.

In the surveys, all runners reported increasingly narrowing and decreasingly widening attention over time as they neared a goal – i.e., the finish line. Better runners, including elite competitive runners and faster runners, based on self-reported pace and competition performance times, tended to rely on attentional narrowing more than casual runners did.

To confirm the survey responses were consistent with actual performance, the researchers conducted a series of running experiments in which participants were told to either widen or narrow their attentional scope in running one of two distances: 400 meters or one mile (1.6 kilometers). In two of the experiments, the runners were told to narrow their attentional scope during their entire run while in the third they were told to do so more at the end rather than the beginning. In one of these experiments, the researchers monitored the heart rates of the runners before and during the run – a means to gauge effort.

In all three experiments, runners who narrowed their attention, especially at the end, ran at a faster pace than those who widened it. Additionally, those with a narrow focus spent more time with heart rates that exceeded their typical baseline heart rate when running, suggesting that narrowing attention was associated with greater physical effort.

“The studies show that narrowing attention isn’t just correlated with performance,” said Corey Guenther, a professor of psychological science at Creighton University and one of the study’s authors. “It actively enhances it.”

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