Choking Under Pressure, The Behavioral Decrements of Visual Imagery

Abstract

Performance Pressure is an internal psychological experience that results in external physiological and behavioral changes. The internal experience is motivated by the expectation of an outcome in relation to attaining a desired goal or end state. The external manifestation of pressure can vary in its form from person to person even with identical tasks. External changes can compound relative to the internal weight of the pressure created by the goal. The amount of monetary reward, social evaluation, fear of failure, and other variables can combine to create an internal experience capable of creating external behavioral decrements in performance. These pressure variables are commonplace in sports. However, in the world of golf, choking under pressure is especially common. Golf is unique in that it is one of the only sports that requires the athlete to maintain a mental representation of the target location, before enacting a motor movement towards the image held in their mind. This experiment aimed to uncover if one of the reasons golfers may be more susceptible to performance pressure is due to mental imagery being especially vulnerable to the internal experience of performance pressure in the mind. By leveraging a Visual Working Memory Task, lab-induced pressure, and verifying the physiological experience through eye-tracking. The findings reveal that pressure does not impact participants' scores in a uniform way, but affects the visual cache resulting in behavioral decrements when the visual scene has a large amount of stimuli to encode. These findings give statistically significant contributions to the penetrable temporal timing when pressure is most prevalent in Visual Working Memory paradigms, and sets a foundation for future research into reducing the effects of performance pressure.