Poor performance in pressure-filled situations, or "choking under pressure," has largely been explained by two different classes of theories. Distraction theories propose that choking occurs because ...attention needed to perform the task at hand is coopted by task-irrelevant thoughts and worries. Explicit monitoring theories claim essentially the opposite--that pressure prompts individuals to attend closely to skill processes in a manner that disrupts execution. Although both mechanisms have been shown to occur in certain contexts, it is unclear when distraction and/or explicit monitoring will ultimately impact performance. The authors propose that aspects of the pressure situation itself can lead to distraction and/or explicit monitoring, differentially harming skills that rely more or less on working memory and attentional control. In Experiments 1-2, it is shown that pressure that induces distraction (involving performance-contingent outcomes) hurts rule-based category learning heavily dependent on attentional control. In contrast, pressure that induces explicit monitoring of performance (monitoring by others) hurts information-integration category learning thought to run best without heavy demands on working memory and attentional control. In Experiment 3, the authors leverage knowledge about how specific types of pressure impact performance to design interventions to eliminate choking. Finally, in Experiment 4, the selective effects of monitoring-pressure are replicated in a different procedural-based task: the serial reaction time task. Skill failure (and success) depends in part on how the performance environment influences attention and the extent to which skill execution depends on explicit attentional control. (Contains 2 tables, 7 figures and 1 footnote.)
Listeners are able to glean information from the gestures that speakers produce, seemingly without conscious awareness. However, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie this process. ...Research on human action understanding shows that perceiving another's actions results in automatic activation of the motor system in the observer, which then affects the observer's understanding of the actor's goals. We ask here whether perceiving another's gesture can similarly result in automatic activation of the motor system in the observer. In Experiment 1, we first established a new procedure in which listener response times are used to study how gesture impacts sentence comprehension. In Experiment 2, we used this procedure, in conjunction with a secondary motor task, to investigate whether the listener's motor system is involved in this process. We showed that moving arms and hands (but not legs and feet) interferes with the listener's ability to use information conveyed in a speaker's hand gestures. Our data thus suggest that understanding gesture relies, at least in part, on the listener's own motor system.
In the current study, we explored how a person's physiological arousal relates to their performance in a challenging math situation as a function of individual differences in working memory (WM) ...capacity and math-anxiety. Participants completed demanding math problems before and after which salivary cortisol, an index of arousal, was measured. The performance of lower WM individuals did not depend on cortisol concentration or math-anxiety. For higher WM individuals high in math-anxiety, the higher their concentration of salivary cortisol following the math task, the worse their performance. In contrast, for higher WM individuals lower in math-anxiety, the higher their salivary cortisol concentrations, the better their performance. For individuals who have the capacity to perform at a high-level (higher WMs), whether physiological arousal will lead an individual to choke or thrive depends on math-anxiety.
Experience alters behavior by producing enduring changes in the neural processes that support performance. For example, performing a specific action improves the execution of that action via changes ...in associated sensory and motor neural circuitry, and experience using language improves language comprehension by altering the anatomy and physiology of perisylvian neocortical brain regions. Here we provide evidence that specialized (sports) motor experience enhances action-related language understanding by recruitment of left dorsal lateral premotor cortex, a region normally devoted to higher-level action selection and implementation--even when there is no intention to perform a real action. Experience playing and watching sports has enduring effects on language understanding by changing the neural networks that subserve comprehension to incorporate areas active in performing sports skills. Without such experience, sport novices recruit lower-level sensory-motor regions, thought to support the instantiation of movement, during language processing, and activity in primary motor areas does not help comprehension. Thus, the language system is sufficiently plastic and dynamic to encompass expertise-related neural recruitment outside core language networks.
Embodied Learning Across the Life Span Kontra, Carly; Goldin-Meadow, Susan; Beilock, Sian L.
Topics in cognitive science,
10/2012, Letnik:
4, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Developmental psychologists have long recognized the extraordinary influence of action on learning (Held & Hein, 1963; Piaget, 1952). Action experiences begin to shape our perception of the world ...during infancy (e.g., as infants gain an understanding of others’ goal‐directed actions; Woodward, 2009) and these effects persist into adulthood (e.g., as adults learn about complex concepts in the physical sciences; Kontra, Lyons, Fischer, & Beilock, 2012). Theories of embodied cognition provide a structure within which we can investigate the mechanisms underlying action’s impact on thinking and reasoning. We argue that theories of embodiment can shed light on the role of action experience in early learning contexts, and further that these theories hold promise for using action to scaffold learning in more formal educational settings later in development.
Multiple Social Identities and Stereotype Threat Rydell, Robert J; McConnell, Allen R; Beilock, Sian L
Journal of personality and social psychology,
05/2009, Letnik:
96, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In 4 experiments, the authors showed that concurrently making positive and negative self-relevant stereotypes available about performance in the same ability domain can eliminate stereotype threat ...effects. Replicating past work, the authors demonstrated that introducing negative stereotypes about women's math performance activated participants' female social identity and hurt their math performance (i.e., stereotype threat) by reducing working memory. Moving beyond past work, it was also demonstrated that concomitantly presenting a positive self-relevant stereotype (e.g., college students are good at math) increased the relative accessibility of females' college student identity and inhibited their gender identity, eliminating attendant working memory deficits and contingent math performance decrements. Furthermore, subtle manipulations in questions presented in the demographic section of a math test eliminated stereotype threat effects that result from women reporting their gender before completing the test. This work identifies the motivated processes through which people's social identities became active in situations in which self-relevant stereotypes about a stigmatized group membership and a nonstigmatized group membership were available. In addition, it demonstrates the downstream consequences of this pattern of activation on working memory and performance.
On the Fragility of Skilled Performance Beilock, Sian L; Carr, Thomas H
Journal of experimental psychology. General,
12/2001, Letnik:
130, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Experiments 1-2 examined generic knowledge and episodic memories of putting in novice and expert golfers. Impoverished episodic recollection of specific putts among experts indicated that skilled ...putting is encoded in a procedural form that supports performance without the need for step-by-step attentional control. According to
explicit monitoring
theories of choking, such proceduralization makes putting vulnerable to decrements under pressure. Experiments 3-4 examined choking and the ability of training conditions to ameliorate it in putting and a nonproceduralized
alphabet arithmetic
skill analogous to mental arithmetic. Choking occurred in putting but not alphabet arithmetic. In putting, choking was unchanged by dual-task training but eliminated by self-consciousness training. These findings support explicit monitoring theories of choking and the popular but infrequently tested belief that attending to proceduralized skills hurts performance.
Although parents' fears and worries about math-termed math anxiety-are negatively associated with their children's math achievement in early elementary school, access to an educational math app that ...1st-grade children and parents use together can ameliorate this relation. Here we show that children of higher-math-anxious parents learn less math during 1st-3rd grades, but this is not the case when families are given a math app (even after app use markedly decreases). Reducing the link between parents' math anxiety and their positive attitudes about math for their children helped to explain the sustained benefit of the math app. These findings indicate that interventions involving parents and children together can have powerful lasting effects on children's academic achievement and suggest that changes in parents' expectations for their children's potential for success in math, and the value they place on this success, play a role in these sustained effects.
In the current work we asked whether executive function, as measured by tests of working memory capacity, might benefit from an acute bout of exercise and, more specifically, whether individuals who ...are lower or higher in working memory to begin with would be more or less affected by an exercise manipulation. Healthy adults completed working memory measures in a nonexercise (baseline) session and immediately following a 30-min self-paced bout of exercise on a treadmill (exercise session). Sessions were conducted 1 week apart and session order was counterbalanced across participants. A significant Session x Working Memory interaction was obtained such that only those individuals lowest in working memory benefited from the exercise manipulation. This work suggests that acute bouts of exercise may be most beneficial for healthy adults whose cognitive performance is generally the lowest, and it demonstrates that the impact of exercise on cognition is not uniform across all individuals.
Although practicing a task generally benefits later performance on that same task, there are individual differences in practice effects. One avenue to model such differences comes from research ...showing that brain networks extract functional advantages from operating in the vicinity of criticality, a state in which brain network activity is more scale-free. We hypothesized that higher scale-free signal from fMRI data, measured with the Hurst exponent (
), indicates closer proximity to critical states. We tested whether individuals with higher
during repeated task performance would show greater practice effects. In Study 1, participants performed a dual-n-back task (DNB) twice during MRI (
= 56). In Study 2, we used two runs of n-back task (NBK) data from the Human Connectome Project sample (
= 599). In Study 3, participants performed a word completion task (CAST) across six runs (
= 44). In all three studies, multivariate analysis was used to test whether higher
was related to greater practice-related performance improvement. Supporting our hypothesis, we found patterns of higher
that reliably correlated with greater performance improvement across participants in all three studies. However, the predictive brain regions were distinct, suggesting that the specific spatial
↑ patterns are not task-general.
Individuals vary in the degree to which they improve on a task upon repeating it, referred to as practice effects. Research has shown a relationship between scale-free brain activity and advantageous functional properties for the brain networks. Therefore, we asked if practice effects are related to these scale-free brain dynamics. We hypothesized that individuals with more scale-free fMRI activity, measured with Hurst exponent (
), when repeating tasks would show larger practice effects. Across three datasets including different tasks and individuals, we found that higher fMRI
was associated with greater task performance improvement. We conclude that exhibiting more efficient information processing when performing a cognitive task may be indexed by higher fMRI scale-free activity and predict further improvement in task performance.
PDF
