Performing Under Pressure

• Performers need to coordinate actions in pressured situations.
• Elites cite their ability to perform under pressure as a key distinguishing factor.
• Maintaining effective skill execution under pressure is a desirable attribute.
• Pressure can come from changing spatial/temporal demands, spectators and social expectations.
• The way coaches design practice impacts a performer's ability to cope with pressure.

How the control of movement changes as we learn skills

• Skill acquisition is a gradual process, resulting in behavior less vulnerable to fatigue/anxiety.
• Motor skill acquisition involves understanding the performance goal, engaging appropriate muscles, and modifying action based on feedback.
• Cognitive and ecological approaches are two dominant theoretical approaches.
• The cognitive approach regards the brain as the central organ underpinning movement organization.
• Ecological psychologists see movement as dynamic, self-organization based on task, individual and environmental constraints.
• Initially, learners' movements are slow, discontinuous, inefficient and require concentration.
• Novice performers predominantly rely upon the creation of new neural pathways within areas of the brain's motor cortex that are largely under conscious control.
• Trial and error processes dominate initial attempts, leading to the gradual repetition of a functional movement pattern.
• Early learners typically restrict the movement of many joints of the body to exert control over their limbs.
• 'Freezing' joint coordination is a common control strategy to relieve processing burden.
• As a skill is learned, subconscious regions of the brain stem, the spinal cord, and local muscular feedback loops take over moment-to-moment movement control.
• Learners identify important sources of environmental information to modify and improve their coordination.
• With practice, learners become more selective over which joints need to be actively controlled.
• Good coordination establishes a relationship between limb movement and specific environmental circumstances.
• Intermediate learners identify key sources of information to guide actions.
• Experienced performers have extensive practice and adapt movement patterns to various situations.
• Skilled performers show seemingly automatic control, sharing attentional resources and performing multiple tasks simultaneously.
• Experts display variability from one performance to the next.

Anxiety and skill execution

• Increased anxiety can lead to performance decline among early learners.
• Affective measures, such as state worry, can account for a significant amount of variance in performance levels.
• Perceived anxiety initially improves performance but can lead to 'catastrophic' drops as it increases.
• Anxiety-performance profiles differ based on individual predispositions towards anxiety-inducing conditions.
• Increased anxiety can affect movement features of executions
• Physical and cognitive stressors increase 'neuromotor noise' in the information-processing system.
• High levels of cognitive or physical stress result in unnecessary increases in pressure exerted.
• Physical stress can improve reaction time, but cognitive stress delays responses.
• Increases in anxiety can have different outcomes based on the task and stressor.
• Psychological stress constrains movement patterns, even when task difficulty changes.
• Stress increases reflex activities, impairs working memory, and shifts attentional bias towards threatening information.
• Evaluating an audiene can induce moderate anxiety and delay the transition to synchronous coordination.
• Enhanced stability of movement occurs through recruitment of attention which can lead to an enhanced task-related focus of attention in moderate levels of anxiety.
• Moderate anxiety can motivate performers to produce extra on-task effort with positive or negative consequences.
• High anxiety is associated with decreased movement smoothness, efficiency, and variability.
• Anxiety reduces variability but experts are aware of modifications, which highlighting how previous experience, task expertise, and self-confidence can mediate the anxiety response.
• High anxiety leads to the performer using more exploratory, variable behaviors

'Keeping it together': attentional focus

• Performers must develop the ability to deal with pressure and anxiety to avoid 'choking'.
• Need to understand what about pressure/anxiety results in loss of automated movement control
• Breakdown of rhythms underlying movement may explain behavioral characteristics
• Increase in perceived anxiety has positive and negative effects, clarifying where one's attention allocation

Deautomatization of movement: reinvestment theory

• Performers direct attention toward individual components of the skill under pressure.
• Consciously monitoring and controlling movements disrupts the normally automatic on-line-control of those movements.
• Reinvestment is a stable characteristic of personality.
• High scores on the Reinvestment Scale are associated with disrupted motor performance under anxiety.
• Skilled baseball hitters focus on movement mechanics during slumps, improving awareness of bat location.
• Attention allocation during skill acquisition has implications for avoiding skill failures under pressure.

Shifting attentional focus

• Attention described as 'taking possession by the mind' of one object in the mind.
• Attention in sport is becoming aware of a stimulus array and processing only selected information.
• Nideffer (1976) defines four types of attentional focus: broad-external, broad-internal, narrow-external, and narrow-internal.
• A key mental skill of top athletes is attentional control.
• Paying attention to the effects of a skill generally improves learning.
• An external focus of attention shows superior learning.
• Wulf et al's constrained action hypothesis stating that an internal focus on movements interferes with processes that do not require control

The attentional focus effect is moderated by skill level

• Impact of attentional focus is moderated by skill level.
• Experienced players can perform better with extraneous focus than with skill focus, but vice versa for novice dribblers.
• For skilled golfers, performance better with external focus; unskilled with internal focus.
• For experts, performance is best left to run off automatically but with focus for novice.
• Performers who do not trust capabilities in stressful situations are susceptible to reinvestment.
• Those who think about control of movement when highly anxious demonstrate 'choking'.
• Cognitive strategies can prevent inappropriate thoughts and promote effective movement.

Practical strategies to prevent deautomatization of movement

• Acknowledge skill failures under pressure occur given focus and/or thoughts leading to deautomatization
• Cognitive and implicit motor learning prevent inappropriate thoughts and provide effective movement.

Pre-performance routines

• Performers employ pre-performance routines in a ritualized manner.
• Boyer & Lienard: rituals is part of 'hazard precaution system', thought-suppression.
• Pre-performance routines act as form of rhythmical guide and primes movement system.
• 5-step routine with an instruction to focus, with effort, on an external cue.
• Learners can be taught attentional strategies used by experts with group-focus-on group movements

Cognitive strategies to prevent reinvestment

• Marnassis & Doganis: strategies to decrease one's predisposition to control of one's action, training towards positive thinking and arousal.
• Acclimatize the performer to triggers of the process

Implicit motor learning

• Learn skill w/o awareness of knowledge structures in support of the skill.

• Practice strategies w/o focus of accumulating knowledge w/ implicit knowledge of abstract rules of task w/o awareness.

• Unconscious, faster, more structurally sophisticated and resilient than conscious processes

• Performing 2nd part improving golf but only limited the knowledge of how it was done

• Learning has implicit when low conscious to 'reinvest', even in physiological stress/testing

• Implicit motor learning should encourage hypothesis-testing behavior w/ retainment of memory

• Environment reduces likelihood of the performance.

• Relatively error-free performance environment can lead to learning that is implicit by verbal knowledge

• Benefits of occur even if verbal knowledge is achieved

• Environment can adapted cause implicit motor learning

• The concept of error-free implies that the learner is not required to do repetitive drills to avoid errors completely. (Discourages elements for learning)

• Encourage subtle and progressive adaptations, which have the potential to cause implicit motor learning or adapt environment

• Implicit method that encourages a mode of learning is analogy learning

Summary and conclusion

• With practice, the responsibility for movement control gradually moves into subconscious regions of the brain, with increasing movement and increased ability to perform tasks
• With pressure, athletes experience regression, redirecting attention from movement
• Thought comes about by 'performing extra for task and reflection execution'
• Shift attentional focus to not affect distractions for 'together' and perform with little effort
• Focus during practice may prevent athlete's reinvestment
• If athletes have high likelihood the investment, then coaches must encourage practice activities
• Practice helps an athelete develop an attentional control to transfer in situation
• Practice has suggested that initial is helpful for learners and may provide better learner
• Challenge facing practitioners develop strategies to practice activities