The Psychology of Concentration in Sport Performers

A Cognitive Analysis

Aidan P. Moran

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317716020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This text explores the attentional processes of athletes using a theoretical framework derived from contemporary cognitive psychology.

Chapter One Cognition, psychology and sport: Mental factors in athletic performance

DOI: 10.4324/9781315784946-1

“The mind is sport sciences’ last frontier”

(Straub, 1978, p. 1)

Introduction

Competitive sport provides psychologists with many fascinating opportunities to explore the success with which people can control their own mental processes in the face of adversity. Indeed, some psychologists (e.g. Kirschenbaum, 1984) claim that competitive sport is almost entirely an exercise in cognitive and behavioural “self-regulation”. To illustrate contrasting aspects of this psychological skill, consider two sporting incidents which captured popular imagination around the world in January 1995. The first incident occurred during the quarter-final match of the Australian Open Tennis Championship in Melbourne between the tournament favourite, Pete Sampras, and his main rival, Jim Courier. In the fifth set of this four-hour match, Sampras suddenly broke down in tears after he had learned that his coach, Tim Gullikson, had suffered a suspected brain tumour. Although such concern for the health of one’s coach is understandable, what surprised many observers was that Sampras’ distress did not appear to hinder his performance on court. In fact, statistics reveal that he conceded only two points on his serve for the remainder of the fifth set even though he wept repeatedly during rallies and at the “change-overs” between games. This remarkable disjunction between emotion and behaviour illustrates not only the “automaticity” (see Chapter 2) of Sampras’ tennis skills, but also the fact that athletes must learn to suppress self-generated (or “internal”) distractions in order to perform successfully (see also Chapter 4). But what happens if sport performers lose their mental discipline? This possibility leads us to our second vignette. The incident in this case concerned the brilliant but volatile soccer player, Eric Cantona (of Manchester United and France). Following a “sending off” offence in a league match, Cantona reacted to a taunt from a spectator by leaping over the crowd barrier and launching a “kung fu” kick at him. As a result of this bizarre loss of control, the player was fined by his club, banned by the English Football Association for the rest of the season and required to perform a period of “community service” as restitution for his offence. Clearly, this unprecedented incident reveals a lamentable lack of self-regulation in an otherwise gifted athlete. It also illuminates the wisdom of Straub’s (1978) observation that the mind of the athlete is the last frontier for research in sport science.

These dramatic incidents involving two of the world’s greatest athletes raise the two important questions that underlie this book. What factors (including thoughts and emotions) serve to distract us from our intended actions? Perhaps more importantly, how can we learn to ignore these distractions and improve our concentration? It is interest- ing to note that questions of this nature are currently receiving research attention, outside the sphere of sport, in the emerging fields of “mental control” (Wegner & Pennebaker, 1993) and “self-regulation” (Karoly, 1993). In these domains, psychologists are beginning to examine people’s mundane struggle to regulate their thoughts and emotions in everyday life. The activities in question here involve attempts to “suppress a thought, concentrate on a sensation, inhibit an emotion, stir up a desire, squelch a craving, or otherwise exert an influence on their own mental states” (Wegner & Pennebaker, 1993). Clearly, if paying attention is viewed as an effort to exert control over what we perceive and do, then the study of concentration in athletes offers a potentially fruitful new avenue for the study of how the mind works.

Cognitive Processes in Athletes

Over the past decade, there has been a rapid growth of interest in the mental processes of competitive athletes. This interest is reflected in the upsurge of cognitive research in sport psychology (see overview by Abernethy, 1994b) and in the proliferation of applied “mental skills” training programmes for sport performers (see Chapter 6). Furthermore, an increasing awareness of the “mental side” of sport is evident from interviews with many professional athletes. For example, Alan Kelly, the Sheffield United soccer goalkeeper, explained after his competitive debut for the Republic of Ireland in 1994 that he “didn’t have a lot to do in that game but when I came off I was drenched with sweat as much as rain. And that was all down to concentration. Packie (Bonner) had warned me about this beforehand: It’s one of the biggest differences when you jump up from league to international football” (Mackey, 1994, p. 38). Clearly, this performer understood that the transition from club-level to international-level sporting competition is accompanied by increased mental as well as physical effort. The exertion of this type of mental effort is known as “concentration” (see Chapter 2). The importance of mental factors in sport was also underlined by Mike Marsh, the American champion sprinter, who claimed that the ability to win comes “90% from the mind and 10% from the body” (Chadband, 1995). Taken together, these remarks underline the importance of effective psychological preparation for athletes. Therefore, perhaps Loehr (1989) was more perceptive than Straub (1978) when he observed that “the area of mental training is the last frontier of sport research” (italics mine). Clearly, one reason for the popularity of such training is that in competitive sport, where hundredths of a second may separate winners from the rest, “the extra edge which proper mental preparation can give an athlete is a precious and much sought-after commodity” (Murphy, 1990). Of course, another appeal of mental training is that it offers athletes a desirable alternative to the illegal use of certain “banned” drugs (e.g. steroids and “beta-blockers”) which are alleged to enhance performance.

Given the importance of mental preparation for optimal sporting performance, it is not really surprising that the study of cognitive processes in athletes is now a “hot topic” in sport science. To illustrate, over the past few years, sport psychologists have conducted research on such “cognitive” areas as attention (Abernethy, 1993), memory (Smyth & Pendleton, 1994), perception (Garland & Barry, 1991), mental imagery (Murphy, 1994), attributional processes (Hanrahan, 1995) and decision making (Tenenbaum & Bar-Eli, 1993). In addition, special issues of the International Journal of Sport Psychology have been devoted recently to such cognitive themes as “Information Processing and Decision Making in Sport” (Ripoll, 1991) and to “Expert-Novice Differences in Sport” (Abernethy, 1994b). It is regrettable that this research is rarely cited by contemporary cognitive psychologists (e.g. Hampson & Morris, 1996). Perhaps these researchers view sport solely as a leisure activity and are unaware either of its mental aspects or its potential value as a testing ground for cognitive theories. In this regard, I shall argue that the study of attention in sport performers enables us to investigate the relationship between cognition and action—a topic that has been neglected somewhat by cognitive science. Support for my proposal comes from theorists such as Adams (1987) who criticised cognitive research for being “preoccupied with disembodied perceptions and higher processes, and indifferently concerned with translating perceptions and higher processes into ‘action’” (p. 66). As we shall see in Chapter 2, attention is the bridge between cognition and action. Therefore, the study of attentional processes in athletes helps us to establish a link between cognitive psychology and sport psychology.

The purpose of this chapter is to forge an alliance between cognitive and sport psychology. It is organised as follows. To begin with, I shall explain the terms “cognition”, “cognitive psychology” and “cognitive science”. Then, I shall outline some influences of cognitive theory and research on contemporary sport psychology. Next, I shall examine the challenge which “direct perception” theory (or the “dynamical systems” approach; see review in Clark, 1995) poses to cognitive accounts of motor skill learning. Finally, I shall consider some benefits to cognitive psychology that arise from research on performance in sport.

Cognition, Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science

So far, I have used the terms “cognition” and “cognitive psychology” somewhat loosely. A more precise analysis is now required. The term “cognition” (from the Latin “cognoscere”, to know) refers to the activity or process of “knowing” (Wood, 1983) or to the tasks of gathering and making use of knowledge (Gellatly, 1986). In contemporary usage, “cognition” has been used as a synonym for “mental activity” (Matlin, 1994), thinking (Anderson, 1995b) or “information processing” (Lachman, Lachman, & Butterfield, 1979). For our purposes, therefore, “cognition” refers to any mental activity which is involved in obtaining, storing or using knowledge (including skilled behaviour).

According to Aristotle, our “knowing” capacities (e.g. problem solving) may be distinguished from our “affective” (feeling) and “conative” (willing) activities. This tri-partite view of the mind was also endorsed by the “faculty” psychologists of the 18th century (Hilgard, 1980). For these theorists, the mind contained three faculties: “cognition” (knowing), “conation” (voluntary or intentional activity) and “affect” (emotion). However, since the adoption of the “information processing” paradigm in the 1960s, modern psychologists have focused almost exclusively on cognitive processes, thereby neglecting other aspects of mental life. This oversight means that researchers who investigate cognition “tend to avoid the topics of motivation and emotion” (Eysenck, 1993). Unfortunately, this neglect of non-cognitive factors has led to a rather sterile and constrained approach to understanding how the mind works. For example, Claxton (1980) caricatured contemporary cognitive research by arguing that its typical subject “does not feel hungry or tired or inquisitive; it does not think extraneous thoughts or try to understand what is going on. It is, in short, a computer”. Happily, many psychologists now acknowledge this criticism—and see the study of attention as the ideal means of uniting “hot” and “cold” mental processes. H.A. Simon, the pioneering cognitive scientist, admitted recently that “we need to reconnect cognition with affect and motivation, probably via the mechanisms that determine the focus of attention” (Simon, 1995). Interestingly, this idea has been investigated in clinical psychology where Mathews (1993) has reviewed evidence which indicates that emotional states (e.g. anxiety) influence the manner in which attentional resources are allocated within the cognitive system. I shall return to this idea in Chapter 3 and in Chapter 8.

If “cognition” means “knowledge seeking”, then “cognitive psychology” is the scientific study of this human activity. More generally, this term refers to a modern branch of the discipline of psychology which seeks to obtain empirical answers to the venerable question of how the mind works (Casey & Moran, 1989). Specifically, it may be defined as the scientific study of mental activity or human information processing. Therefore, cognitive psychologists are concerned with explaining the “internal” processes by which people acquire, store and use their knowledge (including skills or “procedural” knowledge) in everyday life (Neisser, 1967). These internal processes are the means by which current stimulus input is combined with past experience. The subject matter of cognitive psychology, therefore, comprises such “knowledge-seeking” processes as attention, memory, problem solving, concept formation and decision making. Although psychological interest in such mental phenomena is at least a century old (e.g. James, 1890, defined psychology as the “science of mental life”), the formal birth of modern cognitive psychology is often traced to a specific date: 11th September, 1956. At this time, the world’s first conference on cognition was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The term “cognitive science” has become increasingly popular in recent years. Although this term has acquired many meanings (see Estes, 1991), it can be defined most generally as an inter-disciplinary movement that is concerned with the study of human intelligence in all of its forms (Osherson & Lasnik, 1990). This movement comprises cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, anthropology, linguistics and philosophy. One of its central tenets is the proposition that the mind is a computational system with three major components (McShane, Dockerell, & Wells, 1992): “cognitive architecture” (i.e. the fixed structure of the cognitive system), “mental representations” (i.e. different formats for the storage of knowledge) and “cognitive processes” (which manipulate these representations). In general, cognitive scientists are concerned with such issues as the nature, development and use of knowledge (Matlin, 1994). They tend to investigate these topics using “computational modelling” techniques whereby working models of human cognitive processes are tested using computer simulations (Eysenck & Keane, 1995). Although they are strongly interested in the mental representation of knowledge, cognitive scientists are less concerned with the behavioural consequences of cognition than are cognitive psychologists.

For many commentators (e.g. Gardner, 1985), the rise of cognitive psychology and cognitive science is acclaimed as a revolution in 20th century psychology: revolution which was hastened by three key developments between 1940 and 1960. First, Chomsky (1959) demonstrated logically that Behaviourism, the dominant paradigm in psychology between the 1920s and the 1950s, was inadequate for the task of explaining how people understand and acquire one of our most important cognitive attributes—language. Second, the development of “communication theory” (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) raised the idea that people may be regarded as “channels” through which information “flows”. Third, the advent of digital computers provided psychologists with the metaphor of the mind as a general-purpose, computational system (see Casey & Moran, 1989). The essence of this view is the notion that thinking is a form of “computation” in which knowledge is manipulated symbolically according to formal rules or “programs”. Neisser (1967) proposed that the task of exploring human cognition is analogous to “trying to understand how a computer has been programmed”. In combination, these influences heralded the symbolic “information processing” approach to cognition which was to become the standard paradigm in cognitive psychology (see Lachman, Lachman, & Butterfield, 1979 for details) until the advent of “connectionism” (discussed later).

Briefly, the central tenet of the information processing paradigm is the view that the mind is a representational system. It does not store knowledge or experiences directly. Instead, it stores symbolic representations of these phenomena. Through cognitive activity, the mind actively transforms these symbolic representations over time (i.e. during the period between stimulus detection and response execution) through “thinking”. In short “thinking” involves the manipulation of internal representations of the external world. Therefore, all cognitive processes (e.g. memory) may be regarded as a series of hypothetical stages during which unique transformations are performed on incoming sensory information (Solso, 1995). To illustrate, in order to remember the name of someone to whom one is introduced at a party, one must “encode” the name in working memory (e.g. by repeating it aloud—an acoustic representation), “store” it in some meaningful format in long-term memory (e.g. by labelling a mental image with the appropriate name) and be able to “retrieve” it later using some recall cue (e.g. the person’s face). In this way, the symbolic representation of the person’s name has been transformed through a sequence of stages from a sound, to an image and, finally, to a verbal response elicited by a social cue (e.g. when someone else joins the conversation, one is expected to introduce one’s new acquaintance to them). Of course, such “stage analyses” of cognitive processes are not the only way of exploring mental life. As an alternative, we could explore cognitive processes in terms of the different types of knowledge which they require. For example, we can distinguish between people’s knowledge of general facts and rules (“semantic knowledge”), specific personal experiences (“episodic knowledge”) and non-verbal skills (“procedural knowledge”). These three types of knowledge interact continu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Section One: Cognitive sport psychology
• 1. Cognition, psychology and sport: Mental factors in athletic performance
• 2. Understanding attention: The psychology of concentration
• Section 2: Concentration in sport
• 3 Concentration in sport performance
• 4. Losing concentration in sport: External and internal distractions
• 5. Measuring attentional processes in athletes: From brain states to individual differences
• Section 3: Concentration techniques
• 6. Improving concentration in sport I: Assumptions, exercises and techniques
• 7 Improving concentration in sport II: Mental practice
• Section 4: Integration
• 8. Concentration in sport performers: Implications and new directions
• References
• Author index
• Subject index