Fighting Left Handers Promotes Different Visual Perceptual Strategies than Right Handers: The Study of Eye Movements of Foil Fencers in Attack and Defence

Left handers have long held the edge over right handers in one-on-one interactive combat sports. Particularly in fencing, top rankings show a relatively strong overrepresentation of left handers over right handers. Whether this can be attributed to perceptual strategies used by fencers in their bouts remains to be established. This study aims to verify whether right-handed fencers assess their opponents' behaviour based on different perceptual strategies when fencing a left vs. right hander. Twelve top-level (i.e., Olympic fencers, Junior World Team Fencing Champions, and top Polish senior foil fencers) right-handed female foil fencers (aged 16–30 years) took part in the study. They performed a total of 40 actions: 10 repetitions of offensive actions (attack) and 10 repetitions of defensive actions (defence), each type of action performed under 2 conditions (right- vs. left-handed opponent). While the participants were fencing, their eye movements were being recorded with a remote eye-tracker (SMI ETG 2.0). Both in their offensive and defensive actions, the fencers produced more fixations to the armed hand and spent more time observing the armed hand in duels with a left-handed (vs. right-handed) opponent. In defence, it was also the guard that attracted more fixations and gained a longer observation time in bouts with a left hander. In duels with a right-handed opponent, a higher number of fixations in attack and in defence, and longer observation times in defence were found for the upper torso. The results may point to different perceptual strategies employed in bouts with left- vs. right-handed individuals. The findings from this study may help to promote the implementation of specialized perceptual training programmes in foil fencing.