I am fortunate to have some very talented rider pals that have contributed some wonderful information to put to print. The object is to make new riders aware of potential problems as well as keep ua experienced riders from becoming complacent. Stuart Pauly is an avid sportbike rider that rides both street and track. He has had years of experience and hopes that his experience can contribute to our safer and better riding skills.

Stuart’s subject it target fixation.

One of the things a new rider has to learn to deal with and something that can still bite a veteran rider is target fixation. What exactly is target fixation? Simply put, target fixation is the act of the brain using the eyes to lock in on something and focus all of your attention on it to the point that you ignore the rest of your surroundings. This can occur from a situation that is, for the most part, harmless up to an extreme situation that is life threatening. So what are some of the situations and how do you learn to not fixate?

A simple example of target fixation is riding down a quiet country road. Your eyes are looking ahead scanning to enjoy the view and to also be on the lookout for potential danger. Two things are going on here. One, your eyes are jumping from target to target. The eye is not capable of scanning smoothly but locks in on objects in small increments of movement. At the same time, your brain is processing the input. The brain is very good at ignoring what it perceives to be normal such as trees going by, the sky, the yellow lines on the road, etc. What the brain is also very good at is isolating visual input that it does not perceive to be normal. So in our scenario, we are riding down the road and our eyes see a dead squirrel in the road. It is perceived by the brain to be out of the ordinary so your eyes tend to continue to look at it. Now two other things come into play. Things happen quickly when you are moving on a motorcycle and you go where you look. These things combined lead you to run over the squirrel again because of target fixation. Harmless enough being that it was a small animal, but the danger becomes very real when it’s a large rock or a pot hole in the road. This type of situation is something you are likely to encounter every time you ride and is pretty easy to deal with because you usually get a lot of notice but it does require a conscious effort to train yourself. Learn to keep your eyes up and down road and to also use your peripheral vision instead of letting your eyes look at everything but keep your eyes moving. Each time you are out, take a few minutes to practice breaking your stare. Pick a spot in the road and pretend it’s an obstacle you need to avoid. Break your eyes away from the object and look where you need to go to miss it. If needed, give yourself a verbal cue to “Look Away” and as you adjust your path to where you need to go, keep your eyes down road and proceed safely past the obstacle. If you do this each time you are out, it will soon become automatic.

An extreme situation for target fixation is brought on by panic. When the brain interprets a visual input as a life threatening situation, it will intensely focus all of its attention to the source of the danger often to the point of your peripheral vision and surroundings being completely ignored and proceed to dump adrenaline into your system. This is what’s commonly referred to as tunnel vision. This response is a survival instinct that has been part of humans since the beginning. If they came across something life threatening, the brain concentrates all of their attention to the danger and then dumps adrenaline to assist in escaping. This worked very well when man was walking or at most running along at a few miles per hour. In modern day when you add a motorcycle to the equation introducing speed, it now becomes a problem.

One very dangerous situation is a vehicle turning left in front of you. In the milliseconds it takes your brain to calculate that your forward speed will likely cause a collision, you will encounter a sense of panic which will cause the brain to react to the danger and by instinct will intently focus (target fixate) you on the danger which is the car. The end result is if you don’t react, you ride directly into the car.

How do we avoid target fixation in a panic case? When I was in law enforcement and training for life and death situations, there was a saying that was always repeated over and over. In an emergency situation you will automatically react how you trained. If you don’t train, you won’t react. This is a very true statement and one of the reasons why so often when a motorcyclist strikes an object, at times there will not be skid marks as they never touched the brakes. The panic caused them to lose all awareness of everything except the vehicle in their path up to and including operating the brakes. That is why we envision and practice emergency braking so when an emergency happens, we react automatically without thinking. But emergency braking may not be enough so we also have to train ourselves not to fixate but to avoid. When you are riding and see a car about to enter the road ahead of you, imagine it pulling out in front of you and going through everything you would need to do for avoidance. The first step is to look away from the target and for an escape path. If you have to, verbally cue yourself to look away. Once you find your escape path, you will then follow that path as you are now looking in that direction. I battle with target fixation on the track. When I’m riding behind and to the outside of someone in a corner, and if they lowside and cross my path, it is very easy to fixate and run into them or follow them off the track. I use a verbal cue to myself to look away every time a crash happens in front of me. I also never stare at the bike in front of me but I’m looking ahead or through the corner.

So in review, keep in mind that target fixation is something that can impact every level of rider. It’s a little more difficult to deal with as it’s not a technique like clutch control, braking or stopping on a hill. To avoid it, you have to train yourself to overcome the natural reflexive action of the human body when it goes into self preservation mode. Just remember to keep your eyes up, moving around and use your peripheral vision instead of trying to look at everything directly. Practice looking away toward a safe direction when you encounter something in your path or a sudden panic moment occurs. Ride toward safety!

Thank you, Stuart for taking the time to put this awesome article together!! I know I’ll be putting the skills to use.