Runners improve performance by narrowing their visual focus

The factors that go into optimizing athletic performance have long been of interest to trainers, scientists, and, of course, athletes themselves. These include workout regimens, nutrition, and technique. A team of psychology researchers has now uncovered a more basic influence on success: visual attention.

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

“Looking at one spot ahead of you—rather than around you—can help you keep going,” explains Emily Balcetis, an associate professor of psychology at New York University and the lead author of the paper, which is published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“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 study’s authors, who included researchers from Creighton and Rutgers universities, add that 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.

“Sharpening your attentional focus is a mental strategy and not just a reaction to battle fatigue,” adds Balcetis, who previously found that attentional narrowing can bolster walking speed. “It’s not ‘tunnel vision’—it’s a tool that helps you push through tough moments. Just changing where and how you look during a hard task can improve your effort and outcomes.”

The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 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. Significantly, 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 that 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—it actively enhances it,” observes Corey Guenther, a professor of psychological science at Creighton University and one of the study’s authors.

“The findings offer a low-cost and simple way to improve running performance—merely by adjusting how we direct our attention,” concludes Shana Cole, an associate professor of psychology in the Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences and one of the study’s authors.