Okay, so the study is not "new" anymore, but I ran into a very interesting
article with the above title yesterday on the Force Science Institute website, though it's from ‘09. (I ran a search of PF and didn’t find anything about it here, but my Google Fu could be weak today.)
The piece lays out how Canadian researchers ran 24 UK cops...
Eleven were highly experienced, male veterans of an Emergency Response Team (ERT), seasoned in fighting terrorists among other assignments, with a median age of nearly 39. The rest were younger rookies (median age just over 30), 7 of them female, who had completed their pre-service firearms and simulation training and were considered “ready for the street.” Both groups predominately were right-eye shooters.
...through a FOF scenario, in which a suspect spun around rapidly holding either a gun or a cell phone (shoot/don’t shoot). The cops wore some pretty fancy gizmos designed to track their corneas and capture their “gaze patterns."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ERT cops were much faster, more accurate, and less prone to making the wrong decision. Perhaps surprisingly, their eyes were focused on the target, while the noobs eyes were focused on their sights. I am not wading into the “point shooting” waters, nor is the FSI. In a follow-up article, called
"Point Shooting" Clarification they write:
Most of the highly experienced officers in the study, in contrast, concentrated their visual focus on the target/suspect, catching only a fast glimpse of their sights in their peripheral vision and relying primarily on “an unconscious kinesthetic sense to know that their gun is up and positioned properly.”
...
“Through innumerable repetitions they have developed a highly accurate feel—a strong kinesthetic sense—for raising their gun to a proper alignment without consciously thinking about it or making a pronounced visual or attentional shift to it. If you ran a laser beam from their eye to the target, it would shine right through their sights.
“Careful sight alignment was an important step in starting them toward that point of excellence. Experience and intensive training are ultimately what brought them there. Over a long time, they were able to transition from one emphasis to another. Yet even at their exceptional performance level, referencing the sights in some manner, however fleetingly or peripherally, was still part of their response in the type of rapidly unfolding encounter designed for this study.”
Hope you find them both interesting. They address training implications as well.
(Edited to add: Only concerns irons, as this was way pre-RDS.)