On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?

“Why does the execution of a well-learned skill fail under pressure? Research investigating skill and expertise has produced a number of important findings regarding the variables that mediate optimal skill performance (Allard & Starkes, 1991; Anderson, 1982, 1987; Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993; Keele, 1986; Lo…”

“To others, however, a problem will come immediately to mind: There is well-known evidence suggesting that expertise serves to enhance episodic recollection, not degrade it. For example, in their classic chess study, Chase and Simon (1973) found that chess masters were better able to recall briefly presented chess posi…”

“…EEG measures will yield novel insights into the mechanisms of attention, accounting for variability in other cognitive processes that depend on attention, such as memory encoding (Otten et al. 2002, Turk-Browne et al. 2006), or performance impairments due to anxiety (choking) (Beilock & Carr 2001).”

“This is a common occurrence in situations accompanied by high performance anxiety, and is proposed as the mechanism behind ‘choking’ in professional sport (Beilock and Carr, 2001).”

“…& Squire, 2005; Adam & van Wieringen, 1983; Baddeley & Woodhead, 1982; Baumeister, 1984; Baumeister & Showers, 1986; Baumeister & Steinhilber, 1984; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Bliss, 1895; Boder, 1935; Borkovec, 1976; Dietrich, 2004; Eysenck & Keane, 1995; Freud, 1922; Gallwey, 1982; Henry & Rogers,…”

“Because people have limited introspective access to the implicit cognitive associations that guide their habits (e.g., Beilock & Carr, 2001; Foerde et al., 2006), they are forced to infer the relevant internal states from external behaviors and the contexts in which the behaviors occur (Bem, 1972).”

“And we (Beilock, Kulp, Holt, & Carr, 2004) explored the cognitive processes governing ‘‘choking under pressure.’’ Choking, or performing more poorly than expected given one’s skill, occurs in situations in which the desire for high-level performance is maximal ( Beilock & Carr, 2001 ).”

“Our work not only demonstrates the value of examining underlying process as a means to gain a fuller theoretical understanding of stereotype threat but also provides an important theoretical bridge between work on stereotype threat (e.g., Steele, 1997; Steele et al., 2002; Wheeler & Petty, 2001) and research in cognit…”

“It has been shown that consciously focusing on the execution of specific components of a complex motor skill can impair performance (e.g., Baumeister 1984, Beilock & Carr 2001, Lewis & Linder 1997).”

“However, recent studies have shown that working memory is negatively affected by fear ~Baddeley & Hitch, 1994; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Elzinga & Roelofs, 2005; see Arnsten, 1998, for review of the neurotransmitters implicated!.”

“Because habits are activated largely through procedural knowledge, people have access to few internal cues to performance (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Poldrack et al., 2001).”

“Whereas accounts of skilled performance based on automaticity (Fitts and Posner 1967, Beilock and Carr 2001) emphasise reduced cognitive involvement in advanced skill, other accounts propose that skilled performance relies on increased cognitive control (Ericsson and Kintsch 1995).”

“Thus, distraction and explicit monitoring theories make contrasting predictions concerning the mechanisms responsible for performance decrements under pressure.”

“In the general domain of skill execution, dedicating Type 2 attentional resources to the execution of well-practiced skills hinders performance and, in such situations, inducing cognitive load – that is, inducing Type 1 processing – improves performance [139,140].”

“performing worse than expected [165, 166]) in high-pressure situa-”

“This scenario has been previously established to be highly effective in producing feelings of performance pressure and anxiety in participants (Beilock & Carr, 2001, 2005; Beilock et al., 2004; Markman, Maddox, & Worthy, 2006).”

“Beilock and Carr (2001) found that skilled performance suffers when the reward of another person is contingent on the participant’s success (for similar results, see also Butler & Baumeister, 1998). They argued that such a condition produces extra performance pressure, which in turn leads to explicit monitoring and th…”

“Beilock and Carr (2001) investigated this phenomenon in a series of descriptive studies and experiments.”

“Expert performance is thought to occur more automatically, largely controlled by procedures that run outside of working memory during execution (Anderson, 1993; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Fitts & Posner, 1967; Keele & Summers, 1976).”

“During increased competition, athletes tend to focus on anxiety-related cues (Jones & Uphill, 2004; Moran, 1996), which often hurts their performance (Beilock & Carr, 2001).”

“the sudden and catastrophic deterioration of skills in an appropriately stressful environment (Beilock and Carr, 2001; Linder et al., 1999), provide strong evidence that factors other than those involved in the refinement of motor programs must be involved in determining performance in a given situation, such as those…”

“Leavitt (1979) and Beilock and Carr (2001) compared novices and experts on tasks at a fixed level of difficulty.”

“It is also important to note that our interview procedure does not ask athletes to remember the “real time sensorimotor demands” (Beilock & Carr, 2001, p. 704) of their performances but rather focuses on the recall of factual knowledge about concrete activities they engaged in throughout their…”

“However, if the demands on conscious processing exceed working memory capacity, cognition generated by the nonconscious pathway will manifest without the full benefit of conscious monitoring or modification ( Beilock & Carr, 2001 ; Beilock, Wierenga, & Carr, 2002 ; Brown & Bennett, 2002 ; J.”

“…about category membership and therefore relies on working memory and executive attention, similar to many of the demanding cognitive tasks (e.g., math problem solving) explored in the pressure literature to date (DeCaro, Thomas, & Beilock, 2008; Waldron & Ashby, 2001; Zeithamova & Maddox, 2006).”

“Previous studies in adults have consistently shown that math anxiety can hinder performance by limiting working memory resources (Hopko et al., 1998; Ashcraft and Kirk, 2001; Beilock and Carr, 2001, 2005; Ashcraft and Krause, 2007).”

“Although there is no direct evidence yet, execution focus models claim that this is also what happens under anxiety (e.g., Beilock & Carr, 2001; Masters, 1992).”

“, 2002), the electroencephalographic patterns of the pre-putt routine (Crews and Landers, 1993), the responses of golfers to pressure (Beilock and Carr, 2001) and the study of the ‘yips’ in putting (Smith et al.”

“The expression ‘‘choking under pressure’’ is used to describe what happens when people perform more poorly than expected given their skill level pre- cisely because there are large incentives for optimal performance and highly negative consequences for poor performance (Beilock & Carr, 2001).”

“In examining the attentional mediators of choking, Beilock and Carr (2001) used the term explicit monitoring to refer collectively to self-focus theories of choking, arguing that they ultimately refer to the allocation of attention to skill execution. Experimental evidence for explicit monitoring includes the fi nding…”

“Essentially, there are two parallel processing paths that depart from the striatum, each of which acts in opposition to each other in the control of movement and enables associations with other relevant functional structures (Beilock and Carr, 2001).”

“Nevertheless, as most well-learned sporting skills tend to be proceduralised and processed automatically outside working memory (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Gray, 2004), it is recognised that their execution is likely to remain robust to distraction, but susceptible to self-focus (Lewis & Linder, 1997;…”

“…which Covington (2000, p. 185) referred to as a “failure-oriented (competitive) ability game,” has every chance of seriously increasing failure-focused attention (Covington, 2000) even for high-achieving students, which could in turn lead to choking under pressure (Beilock & Carr, 2001).”

“It will also be informative to determine additional factors that interact with expertise in determining the tendency to adhere to the TTF heuristic, such as working memory ( Beilock & Carr, 2001 ) or perceptual expertise (Williams & Ward, 2003).”

“Beilock and Carr (2001) found support for this notion.”

“Recently, Oudejans (2008) and Oudejans and Pijpers (2009, 2010) showed that training with anxiety may lead to improved performance under stressful circumstances (cf. Beilock and Carr 2001; Driskell et al. 2001).”

“One other successful training method in the literature (e.g., Wan & Huon, 2005; Beilock & Carr, 2001) has been to videotape participants during practice before subjecting them to a pressure task.”

“In general, directing attention to the movement effect seems to speed the learning process ( Wulf, 2007b ) so that automaticity is achieved sooner than it would be with a more traditional approach to learning, which assumes that novices need to direct their attention to the step-by-step coordination of their movements…”

“When incentives for performing well are high, individuals can " choke under pressure " and perform more poorly than when the importance of performing well is not as salient (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Beilock, Kulp, Holt, & Carr, 2004).”

“Attending to one’s own skilled performance often impairs that performance (Baumeister, 1984; Beilock and Carr, 2001).”

“To explain choking in perceptual-motor tasks, such as handgun shooting, several models have been put forward in the perceptual-motor and sports sciences literature (see Baumeister 1984, Masters 1992, Lewis and Linder 1997, Beilock and Carr 2001).”

“Lewis and Linder (1997) and Beilock and Carr (2001) provided more direct support for this acclimatization hypothesis by demonstrating that selfconsciousness training eliminated choking under mild pressure for beginners on a golf-putting task.”

“There is support for the distraction hypothesis in tasks that load heavily on working memory (e.g., many mental tasks, such as mathematical computation) but support for a self-focus explanation in tasks that make few demands on working memory (e.g., high level motor skills, such as golf putting; Beilock & Carr, 2001;…”

“Beilock and Carr ( 2001 ) use the term “explicit monitoring” to describe this inward shift of attention on the step-by-step control of an automated movement.”

“…Type 2 processing as the potential to disturb athletic performance as predicted y the paralysis by analysis hypothesis (e.g. Baumeister, 1984; eilock & Carr, 2001; Hardy, Mullen, & Jones, 1996; Masters, 992)—i.e. skilled performance can be disrupted from direcing attention toward monitoring…”

“This explanation does not seem likely given that individuals could not explicate how the dyads differed, which suggests that they were not using explicit processes to choose one dyad over another (Beilock & Carr, 2001).”

“In addition, Beilock and Carr (2001) found that training people to perform under states of high self-consciousness eliminated choking during laboratory golf putting challenges.”

“…Neal (2009, p. 584) argue, “Because people have limited introspective access to the implicit cognitive associations that guide their habits (e.g., Beilock and Carr, 2001; Foerde et al., 2006), they are forced to infer the relevant internal states from external behaviors and the contexts i which…”

“A focus of basic research on the topic appears to hone in on attentional theories and the role that closely monitoring well-learned skills has in hurting performance (Beilock & Carr, 2001 ), especially for those with established expertise in the task (Beilock, Carr, MacMahon, & Starkes, 2002 ).”

“, 2010). In this context, anxiety can be understood as an aversive emotional and motivational state occurring in threatening circumstances (Eysenck et al., 2007). Eysenck et al. (2007) propose that under high levels of state anxiety individuals have an automatic tendency to ruminate and to worry about the quality of t…”

“To reduce bias in high-stakes situations, it may be important for police to train in situations that are similar to actual officer-involved shootings (Beilock & Carr, 2001).”

“Several studies show that when perceptual-motor skills are learned under conditions inducing self-awareness (Lewis & Linder, 1997), or self-consciousness (Beilock & Carr, 2001), choking is inoculated.”

“Experimental evidence supports the primary tenets of self-focus explanations (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Gucciardi & Dimmock, 2008; Jackson et al., 2006; Mesagno et al., 2009), however, recent qualitative choking investigations (e.g., Hill et al., 2010b; Oudejans et al., 2011) question the ubiquity of…”

“These shifts either lead to explicit attention to the sequential steps of how the skill should be executed (explicit monitoring hypothesis; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Jackson, Ashford, & Norsworthy, 2006), or perhaps even to conscious control of the sequential steps of how the skill should be executed…”

“Some researchers (Beilock & Carr, 2001) have proposed evidence that conscious attention might interfere with performance, but a recent review and study suggest that when expert performers are allowed to verbalize their thoughts freely rather than being forced to verbalize particular information,…”

“…in attention have been identified as one of the key mechanisms underlying changes (mostly decrements) in performance due to anxiety (Baddeley, 1972; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Janelle, Singer, & Williams, 1999; Landers, Wang, & Courtet, 1985; Liao & Masters, 2002; Mullen et al., 2005; Weltman &…”

“…shows that when the pressure to perform increases, both subjects in the laboratory and experts in the real world start to explicitly monitor their behavior, disrupting learned motor skills, and impairing performance (Baumeister, 1984; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Lewis & Linder, 1997; Wan & Huon, 2005).”

“…to those theories, proceduralization makes a well-learned skill vulnerable to decrements under pressure because pressure raises self-consciousness and anxiety about performing correctly, which increases the attention paid to skill processes and their step-by-step control (Beilock & Carr, 2001).”

“When distracted, individuals often perform poorly, relative to their normal ability (Beilock & Carr, 2001).”

“A series of studies by Beilock and Carr demonstrated that choking occurred as a result of explicitly monitoring the mechanics of the putting stroke in response to self-consciousness and achievement anxiety. The authors proposed that performance pressure elicited maladaptive efforts to impose step-by-step monitoring an…”

“Explicit monitoring theories suggest that performance decrements can be caused by the transfer of behavioral control from an automatized habit system to a goal-directed deliberative system (Baumeister, 1984; Beilock and Carr, 2001; Beilock et al., 2004; Langer and Imber, 1979).”

“Thirdly, Papineau appeals to the fact that, at least sometimes, conscious thought interferes with the smooth and easy flow of motor skill (Beilock and Carr 2001; Beilock, et al. 2002; Beilock 2007, 2010).”

“As demonstrated in Beilock and Carr (2001) and Beilock and Carr (2005), the cognitive-interference model is most rational for learners who have the cognitive and self-regulatory skills to enact effective learning strategies.”