Choking

The paradoxical harmful effects of motivation and incentives on skilled performance ("choking under pressure") are observed in a wide variety of motor tasks. Two theories of this phenomenon suggest that choking under pressure occurs due to maladaptive attention and top-down control, either through distraction away from the task or interference via an overreliance on controlled processing of a skilled task. A third theory, overmotivation (or overarousal), suggests that under pressure, "instinctive" or Pavlovian approach/withdrawal responses compete with the desired response. Only the two former theories predict that choking under pressure would be less likely to occur if an individual is unaware of the skill over which to assert top-down control. Here we show that only participants who train and perform with premovement cues that allowed for preparatory movement planning choke under pressure due to large monetary incentives, and that this effect is independent of ...