What is eye dominance? In short, it’s the eye that your brain prefers. Your dominant eye has more neural connections to your visual cortex than your non-dominant eye and provides more accurate visual information to your brain.
Your eyes are about 3 inches apart, which means they have a slightly different perception of the world around you. Your brain stitches together these slightly different views and gives you a lot of visual information about the location of objects and depth perception. The degree to which one eye is more dominant than the other varies with each person — and a small percentage of people have no dominant eye.
Why is Eye Dominance Important?
When you’re shooting, your dominant eye is telling your brain where your target is – so it’s really important to know which eye is dominant.
You always want your dominant eye over the bore and aligned with your target. If you have your non-dominant eye over the bore, your brain is getting slightly incorrect information about the location of your target – meaning you will not shoot as accurately.
How to Determine Your Eye Dominance
There are a few different methods for finding which eye is dominant.
Method 1
- With your palms facing out, make a small triangle window between your thumbs and forefingers (about 2-3 inches across) and hold your arms straight in front of you.
- Focus on a spot a short distance away like a light switch or door knob through the window in your hands with both eyes open.
- Close your left eye. Did your target move out of view? Or can you still see if? If you can still see your target with your right eye open, you’re right eye dominant.
- Close your right eye. Did your target move out of view? Or can you still see it? If you can still see your target with your left eye open, you’re left eye dominant.
There are variations of this test on how you can make the window with your hands, but the procedure is the same.