Choking under pressure: Executive control of well-practiced skills  (by Tom Carr, from his website)

Heavily practiced skills appear to be susceptible to a certain kind of failure that seems surprising given their otherwise robust nature – choking under pressure.  Motivation to perform well can backfire, resulting in poorer performance rather than the desired exceptional performance.  Two questions naturally arise: why does choking occur, and will the explanation of choking provide new insights into the knowledge and processing that support skilled performance. To pursue these questions, my graduate student Sian Beilock and I (Tom Carr) have adopted golf putting as a model system.  Most of the experimental evidence for choking comes from sensorimotor tasks.  Theories of skill acquisition suggest that heavily practiced sensorimotor skills ought to be controlled by motor programs that operate largely outside of conscious control and require few of working memory’s limited resources.  This conforms well to one of the available theories of choking, which proposes that pressure entices performers to try to exert step-by-step conscious control over a skill that ought be allowed to run off automatically.  To test this theory, we are using explicit memory for performance (which should be poor if the performance does not require attention), instructional manipulations (the right kind of practice might eliminate choking if it enables the performer to adapt to the specific cognitive problem that causes the reduction in performance), and comparisons between putting and other tasks that depend on cognitive operations rather than motor programs (fact retrieval, complex mathematical computations).  So far we have two papers in press (Beilock & Carr, in press, Beilock et al., in press), a book chapter in preparation, and several conference presentations arising from a large number of experiments.  This is a very productive line of work that we hope will ultimately produce a systematic theory of the representational substrates of different classes of skilled performance and a set of instructional curricula that will innoculate performers in these various skill domains against the sometimes-negative impact of pressure to perform exceptionally well.

References:

Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001).  On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 701-725.

Beilock, S. L., Afremow, J. A., Rabe, A., & Carr, T. H . "Don't miss!" (2001). The debilitating effects of suppressive imagery on golf putting performance.  Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 23, 200-221.

Beilock, S. L., Carr, T. H., MacMahon, C., & Starkes, J. L. (2002). When attention becomes counterproductive: Divided versus skill-focused attention in performance of sensorimotor skills by novices and experts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8, 6-16.