Does the Wall Start to Look Different the More We Climb?

At the base of a boulder problem, some climbers spend long seconds tracing the holds with their eyes, while others seem to understand the sequence almost immediately. Research in climbing, golf, and baseball raises a surprisingly profound question: As we learn how to act in an environment, do we also start to perceive it differently?

© Louis Lepron for Vertige Media

There’s a moment at the base of a boulder problem when you haven’t started climbing yet, but in a sense you already have. You find the start, trace the holds up to the finish, then backtrack because something doesn’t add up. You mime a cross move, hesitate over a foothold, stare at a hold without knowing what you could possibly do with it.

Then someone else walks up, looks at the exact same wall for much less time, and starts climbing with a sequence that, in hindsight, seems almost obvious. It’s easy to chalk that up to experience. But what exactly does experience change? Do experienced climbers think faster? Do they remember more? Or does the wall itself, in some sense, look different to them?

51 Seconds

In 2024, a team of sports science and cognition researchers fitted 60 climbers with eye-tracking glasses while they previewed two boulder problems. All of the participants were men, divided into three groups of 20: intermediate, advanced, and elite. The first problem was designed for advanced climbers, the second for elite climbers. Each participant had five minutes to inspect and attempt the problem, but there was no required preview time. Climbers decided for themselves when they had seen enough to start. That allowed the researchers to measure not only where they looked, but also how long each climber felt they needed to come up with a workable sequence.

They seem to need fewer passes through the problem before deciding they have a sequence they trust enough to try

On the first problem, intermediate climbers spent an average of 108 seconds figuring out their solution. Advanced climbers took 74 seconds. Elite climbers took 51. The intermediates also scanned through the problem about 2.5 times on average, compared with 1.5 times for the advanced climbers and 1.1 times for the elites. Among the elite climbers, 85 percent followed a relatively linear visual path from the starting holds toward the finish. Intermediate climbers were much more likely to backtrack, jump from one section of the wall to another, and then start over.

So the difference isn’t simply that stronger climbers save a few seconds before pulling on. They seem to need fewer passes through the problem before deciding they have a sequence they trust enough to try. Once expertise is established, part of the problem appears to get solved faster. The question is why.

In the Eye of the Beholder

For a moment, leave the climbing gym and head to a golf course. In 2008, psychologist Jessica Witt and her colleagues asked 46 golfers to estimate the size of the hole after playing a round. The golfers who had played better that day perceived the hole as larger than those who had played worse. More surprisingly, their handicap—a better measure of their usual skill level—was not significantly associated with how large they thought the hole was.

In other words, it wasn’t simply a case of “better golfers see a bigger hole.” Perception appeared to vary with what someone had just been able to do. Findings like these became part of a body of research later discussed by researcher Rob Gray under the term “embodied perception.” The basic idea is straightforward: We may not always perceive the world as an external scene that exists independently of us. What we see may also be calibrated, at least in part, by what we are capable of doing within it.

Psychologists sometimes describe this process as ‘chunking.’ With experience, several pieces of information stop being processed individually and become a single familiar pattern

Other experiments have produced similar results. A target can appear closer when someone has a tool that allows them to reach it. Baseball players who were hitting better on a particular day judged the ball to be larger. In Witt’s golf experiments, participants putting from an easier position later judged the hole to be larger than participants who had attempted the putt from farther away.

It’s an appealing idea—perhaps a little too appealing for some psychologists, who dispute whether these experiments actually demonstrate a change in perception itself. The differences might instead come from judgment, memory, or the way participants interpret and respond to the task. The debate remains unresolved.

But applied to climbing, the question is still fascinating. Is a hold simply a shape with a given size and orientation? Or does it also appear to us in terms of what our body believes it can do with it?

A Sixth Sense

Research conducted specifically on climbers offers one possible answer. In 2002, movement scientists Mark Boschker, Frank Bakker, and Claire Michaels, then at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, asked seven expert climbers, four novices, and nine non-climbers to memorize a wall containing 23 holds and then reconstruct its layout. The experts remembered more information. More importantly, they remembered a different kind of information. The inexperienced participants focused more on the shape, orientation, and location of individual holds. The expert climbers paid more attention to their functional properties: what the holds could be used for and how they related to one another.

That is a fundamental difference. A beginner might see a small edge here, a foothold there, and a big hold farther up. With experience, that same arrangement may immediately suggest opposition between the hands and feet, a cross move, or a foot switch. The number of holds hasn’t changed. What changes is the unit in which the climber reads them.

Psychologists sometimes describe this process as “chunking.” With experience, several pieces of information stop being processed individually and become a single familiar pattern. The same thing happens in chess: An experienced player does not necessarily memorize every piece one by one, but recognizes entire configurations. Climbing adds another layer because the body is part of the equation. A hold matters because you can reach it, push against it, pull on it, hook a heel on it, or use it to shift your center of gravity. As a climber’s movement repertoire grows, certain possibilities become easier to spot.

That may be where the eye-tracking study becomes most interesting. Elite climbers don’t have faster eyes. They simply have more patterns available to recognize. And when the second problem in the experiment gets harder, their advantage shrinks. The elite climbers spend more time looking and scan more of the wall. When they encounter something that doesn’t fit what they already know, their eyes start searching again too.

None of this means expertise literally makes a hold look bigger, as if someone had zoomed in on an image. The golf research doesn’t prove that, and neither does the climbing study. Taken together, though, these studies suggest something subtler: Seeing is not simply a matter of receiving an image.

It is also knowing what you can do with it.