Motor skill under pressure 1 Running head: MOTOR SKILL UNDER PRESSURE Motor skill under pressure: games, stress and automaticity

Choking under pressure is described by distraction and explicit monitoring theories (DeCaro, Thomas, Albert, & Beilock, 2011). Distraction theories propose that distraction disrupts tasks that rely on working memory, while explicit monitoring disrupts automatic processes such as proceduralized motor skills. Furthermore, the attentional control theory (ACT) incorporates emotion in the form of anxiety to predict detrimental effects on performance efficiency, but not effectiveness (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007). The present study examined the use of a video game task intended to manipulate performance pressure and anxiety and investigated the resulting effects on a motor skill task. The discrete sequence production (DSP) task was proceduralized by practice and used as the motor skill task in a task switching design with the pressure manipulating game task. Evidence was found for both explicit monitoring, affecting the proceduralized DSP task, and distraction theories, affecting switching between the game task and the DSP task. Effects of anxiety were also found, but no main affects that were predicted by ACT, indicating the need for further research on this matter. In conclusion, it appears that video games are indeed suitable to manipulate pressure situations on motor skills. Motor skill under pressure 3 Motor skill under pressure: games, stress and automaticity Folk psychology states that pressure and anxiety should have an adverse effect on performance. An interesting question could be, for instance, how well does a police officer perform at aiming his weapon and firing when he or she is under direct threat? The task of firing a weapon has been learned beforehand, so there is no novelty in performing the action itself. More generalized, motor skill is involved in this action, and therefore the question can be generalized to how motor skill is affected by high pressure situations, and how this can be investigated with an experiment. However, first we will take a look at the relevant literature. Pressure, or more specifically performance pressure can be described as an anxious desire to perform as well as possible in a situation that is important to the person experiencing it. Usually, people perform worse under this kind of pressure. That is, they perform worse in a situation where the importance of a good performance is high (Baumeister, 1984). So, although the motivation to perform better is higher, they actually perform worse. This paradoxical performance effect has been described as choking under pressure (DeCaro, Thomas, Albert, & Beilock, 2011). To be more specific: choking does not only imply that people perform worse, they perform worse than could be expected from their skill level, in situations where the pressure to perform well is maximal. Multiple theories exist on choking under pressure. Firstly, we will look at two groups of theories concerning negative skill performance and pressure. The first group deals with negative performance due too much attention paid to the execution of a skill, and the latter with too little. These are the explicit monitoring theories and the distraction theories, relatively. These two groups of theories deal with two extremes of pressure, but nonetheless will appear to be two sides of the same coin. Secondly, we will discuss another, separate theory dealing with performance under pressure that also takes emotion into consideration: the attentional control theory, or ACT. Motor skill under pressure 4 Explicit monitoring theories propose that in high pressure situations, self-awareness of a person for the need for a good performance is increased. This leads to a heightened focus on the execution of a skill with the intent to ensure a better performance. It is believed that such a heightened focus on the step-by-step process of execution disrupts proceduralized processes in both learning and execution. Proceduralized processes can be performed while not requiring constant step-by-step attentional control. For example, complex sensorimotor skill tasks, such as golf putting, can be proceduralized with practice. When a skill becomes proceduralized through learning, they can also become susceptible to explicit monitoring (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Langer & Imber, 1979). A different approach are distraction theories, which suggest that poorer performance is caused by the inability or a delay in switching attention away from distracting task-irrelevant thoughts, such as worries about surrounding events, towards the task at hand (Wine, 1971; Beilock & Carr, 2001). A competition for attention emerges between the task to be performed on the one hand and worries over consequences on the other. Attention is an important component of working memory, which deals with task-relevant short-term memories and inhibits irrelevant information. Distraction of attention is associated with working memory problems, as irrelevant tasks take up the limited attentional resources of the working memory. As a consequence, tasks that are negatively influenced by attentional distractions are memory-demanding tasks such as maths, reasoning and rule-governed category learning (Gimmig, Huguet, Caverni, & Cury, 2006). Attempting to combine both groups of theories, DeCaro et al. (2011) propose that aspects of the pressure situation can lead to either distraction and/or explicit monitoring, and that these situations disrupt skills that rely (mostly) on working memory and/or attentional control in different ways. They investigated this with two experiments, which will be discussed next. The first experiment employs a primary/secondary task setup, in the second experiment the pressure conditions during a task were changed. Motor skill under pressure 5 In their first experiment, DeCaro et al. (2011) tested how categorization tasks are differently affected by distraction and explicit monitoring secondary tasks. They used both a rule-based and an information-integration categorization task, with either a distracting secondary task or an explicit monitoring secondary task. The rule-based categorization task consisted of dividing symbols into categories depending on rules, such as color or shape. The prediction was that if the rule-based categorization learning task relied on attention and working memory, it would be disrupted by distraction secondary task, but unaffected by explicit monitoring secondary task. In the information-integration categorization task, the participant had to divide groups of 3 symbols into two categories, depending on the sum of the three symbols. For example, take green = +1 and red = -1, then if the sum of the three symbols > 0, classify as category A, otherwise as category B. For information-integration category learning task, the opposite effects should occur compared to the rule-based categorization task, as good performance on information-integration tasks have small attention and working memory requirements and should only be impaired by an explicit monitoring secondary task. This task required the integration of multiple dimensional values at a pre-decisional stage, presumably unconsciously, and is thought to be similar to proceduralized complex sensorimotor skills, such as golf putting. As distracting secondary task, a go/no-go task was used in which the participants had to react to a certain letter and press the space bar when this letter was displayed. The importance of the task was emphasized by displaying feedback on the performance. The secondary explicit monitoring task was a confidence judgment task, which attempted to get the participant to explicitly monitor the steps of the categorization process. This was done by asking the participants to think about how they were going to categorize the next task and then making them give a confidence rating beforehand. After that, they performed the categorization task as usual. Results confirmed the predictions, as rule based category learning was only disrupted by the Motor skill under pressure 6 distracting secondary task, and information-integration category learning was only disrupted by the explicit monitoring secondary task. In the second experiment, DeCaro et al. (2011) investigated high-pressure conditions to test if the effects for different conditions were analogous to the effects of the secondary tasks of the first experiment. The setup for the second experiment was the same as the first, but instead of secondary tasks, the conditions were changed to either outcome-pressure or monitoring pressure conditions. In the outcome-pressure condition, the participants were promised a monetary reward for a good performance. The participants were told that they were working together with a partner, who would also benefit from a good performance. This partner was in fact fictional and used to further increase outcome-pressure. In the monitoring pressure condition, the participants were informed that they were going to be video-taped for students and professors so that others could watch how the skill was performed, and that the film might be used to study category learning by researchers and psychology classes. During the task, the camera was placed 1 m away from the participant, and the experimenter remained standing behind the camera during the task. The results were analogous to the secondary task setup: the rule-based categorization task suffered from the outcome-pressure condition, and the information-integration categorization task suffered from the monitoring pressure condition. DeCaro et al. (2011) conclude that both theories of choking appear correct and that skill performance under pressure not only depends on the task (attentional demanding or procedural), but also on the type of pressure itself (distraction or explicit monitoring). DeCaro et al. (2011) (purposely) do not address the factor of emotion, which often plays a role in for instance the example of a shooting police man mentioned in the introduction. A pressure theory that does incorporate emotion, in the form of anxiety, is the attentional control theory (ACT), proposed by Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, and Motor skill under pressure 7 Calvo (2007). In the context of ACT, anxiety can be described as an emotional and motivational state during a threatening situations. The level of anxiety of a person at a certain moment, the state anxiety, is determined by the anxiety dimension of the personality of the person, trait anxiety, and the pressure situation at that moment. Trait anxiety is a stable characteristic in the personality of a person. It determines how that person reacts to stimuli and environment and whether that person perceives these as threatening. People with high trait anxiety will more likely show higher state anxiety in normal situations, and show heightened levels of state anxiety in anxiety-inducing situations in comparison to people with lower trait anxiety. State anxiety can be described as a state of tension interrupting the normal emotional state of a person, and can manifest itself with physiological reactions, such as increased sweating and heart rate. The person will experience worry or restlessness, and may react strongly to external stimuli. High levels of state anxiety are especially unpleasant. In the field of psychology, anxiety is associated with adverse effects on cognitive tasks. These effects are what ACT attempts to explain. ACT itself is based on the processing efficiency theory (PET) by Eysenck and Calvo (1992), which attempted to map these effects of anxiety. PET discriminates between performance effectiveness (response accuracy) and performance efficiency (how the effectiveness of a task compares to the effort invested to perform that task). PET rests on two major assumptions. Firstly, it assumes that worry is the component of state anxiety that has an effect on accuracy and efficiency. Worry is activated in high pressure situations and is more likely in individuals with high trait anxiety. Furthermore, worry has two effects. The first effect is that worry takes up attentional resources of the working memory so that less capacity is left for other tasks. This can be compared to task-irrelevant information taking up resources from the working memory in distraction theories. The second effect is the Motor skill under pressure 8 motivation to avoid or reduce the effects of the anxiety by using compensatory strategies. Compensatory strategies, such as enhanced effort and supplementary processing, cause the effectiveness to remain at the same level at the cost of efficiency, but only when enough resources are available. Subsequently, when these resources are not available, effectiveness suffers as well. Secondly, PET assumes that anxiety affects the working memory. According to the working memory model used by PET, the limited-capacity working memory consists of three components: 1) a central executive involved in the processing of information and equipped with self-regulatory functions such as performance monitoring, planning and strategy selection; 2) a phonological loop to process verbal information; 3) a visiospatial sketchpad for processing visual and spatial information. ACT assumes that worry, and more generally anxiety, mainly affects the central executive component of working memory. Therefore, worry interferes the most with tasks that require the processing and storage capacity of the working memory. Anxiety makes demands on the self-regulatory mechanism that has to inhibit worrisome thoughts and at the same time must also support supplementary processes. However, PET does not specify which function of the central executive is adversely affected by anxiety. ACT does, as it uses a refined function set for the central executive: 1) Inhibition: using attentional control to inhibit disrupting task-irrelevant stimuli and responses; 2) Shifting: shifting between multiple tasks, operations or mental sets and and using attentional control at the demand of the tasks at hand; 3) Updating: updating and supervising working memory. The relation between inhibition and attentional control is that the inhibition function uses attentional control to refrain from using resources for task-irrelevant stimuli. The shifting function uses attentional control to shift attention to task-relevant stimuli. As updating is not directly involved with attentional control, the effect of anxiety on this Motor skill under pressure 9 function should be weak. It is suggested that all three functions rely on the same resources of the central executive, and that demands on one function reduces the resources left for the other functions. To explain the detrimental effects of anxiety on attention, ACT uses the view that there are two attentional systems. Firstly, there is the goal-directed attentional system which is influenced by expectation, knowledge and goals, visualizable as a top-down control of attention. Secondly, there is a stimulus driven attentional system influenced by salient stimuli, which can be seen as a bottom-up control of attention. According to ACT, anxiety distorts the balance between these two systems, resulting in an increased influence of the stimulus-driven attentional system and a decrease in influence of the goal-direct attentional system. It is also implied that both systems influence each other. This results in a reduction of the attentional control and a subsequent disturbance of the inhibition and shifting functions, as these rely on the top-down goal-directed attentional system. These disturbances finally lead to a poorer performance. Motor skills and pressure The motor skill tasks that have been used in pressure experiments differ from golf putting (Masters, 1992; Beilock & Carr, 2001; Mullen & Hardy, 2000) to table tennis and (Williams, Vickers, & Rodrigues, 2002)and basketball (Wang, Marchant, Morris, & Gibbs, 2004). Masters (1992) studied explicit and implicit skill acquisition of golf putting and testing under stress conditions, what can now be interpreted as a study of explicit monitoring effects. Implicit training happened without the knowledge of rules, while explicit training was done with knowledge of rules. They used a combination of self-evaluation and monetary rewards to induce stress, and found that performance was less effected in people with less explicit knowledge, showing support for explicit monitoring theories. Motor skill under pressure 10 The sensorimotor task of golf putting was also used to investigate effects of stress by Mullen and Hardy (2000) under stressful conditions with either implicit or explicit skill learning in an effort to find evidence for PET. Their goal was also to investigate if explicit skill learning was detrimental in comparison to implicit skill learning. Explicit learning condition had the participants recite task-relevant instructions to themselves to guide performance, intended to incite self-monitoring. The implicit learning condition had the participants were asked to recite task-irrelevant information in the form of random letters. The low pressure situation was neutral, while the high pressure situation gave direct feedback on their performance in comparison with other participants, being judged by golf professionals, together with the outlook of a monetary reward. Although they find some support for explicit monitoring in the task-relevant reciting condition, their results overall were reported as inconclusive. Once more, golf putting as used by Beilock and Carr (2001) to look at explicit monitoring effects. First, they investigated generic knowledge and episodic memories of putting in golfers, and found out that these memories were generally poor, which they interpreted as evidence of that the golf putting skill is procedural. They then propose that such a proceduralization of putting makes it that skill susceptible to explicit monitoring. In their next experiments, they investigated the effects of training conditions to reduce choking both putting and an arithmetic skill, by using self-consciousness training (inducing explicit monitoring by audience observation) and dual-task (inducing distraction by irrelevant information). They found that choking happened in putting but not in arithmetic skill. Furthermore, they found that dual-task training did not change choking in golf putting, but that self-consciousness training eliminated it. They conclude that their findings support explicit monitoring and that attention to proceduralized skills has a detrimental effect on performance. Williams et al. (2002) investigated PET with a table tennis task with either high or Motor skill under pressure 11 low working memory demands to test the assumption that high anxious persons use increased effort keep their performance effective at the cost of performance efficiency. However, when a too heavy demand is made on working memory, anxiety should lead to poorer efficiency and effectiveness. They used the accuracy in hitting concentric circle targets in a certain sequence as a measure of performance effectiveness, while reaction time, mental effort, visual search data and arm kinematics were used as a measure of efficiency. They found that anxiety had a detrimental effect on effectiveness in both high and low working memory tasks, and found further evidence for decreased performance efficiency in increased reaction time and mental effort. Also, high working memory demands showed more pronounced decrements in efficiency than in low working memory demands, showing support for PET. Wang et al. (2004) used a basketball skill to investigate the effects of dispositional self-consciousness and trait anxiety on choking. The participants did 20 free throws in high and low pressure conditions. Shooting basketballs was shown to be a successful way to induce choking in experiments. This task was described as a mixture between gross motor skill (knee, shoulder and elbow extension) and fine motor skill (wrist and finger turning and rotation), the latter requiring detailed attention. The Wang et al. (2004) experiment manipulated pressure by having an audience witness the shooting. People with high self-consciousness and high trait anxiety performed worse when the audience was present, showing evidence for what can be seen as explicit monitoring effects. A link to this group of theories is not made in their experiment, however. Now that we have discussed the theories and have seen different motor skills under experimental investigation, we must choose a suitable motor skill and pressure