This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The decisive penalty kick in a final, match point in tennis or the last attempt in a competition: When a lot is at stake, even a well-practiced performance can suddenly break down. Yet pressure does not necessarily impair performance.
Some people perform at their best precisely in the moments that matter most. Existing accounts can only partly explain why. Researchers from the German Sport University Cologne, together with colleagues from New Zealand, are now offering a new perspective on this question.
In their article "Beyond attention: Performance pressure shifts information-processing complexity," recently published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, they challenge existing accounts by focusing on a largely overlooked aspect: Under pressure, changes may occur not only in which information receives our attention but also in how that information is processed, integrated and translated into action. For many years, research has examined how attention shifts under pressure. Do we start to consciously control highly automatized movements?
Do we get distracted by the audience or by our own thoughts? These perspectives can help explain why performance deteriorates under pressure. However, they provide a less complete explanation of why people sometimes perform exceptionally well under pressure.
The new perspective therefore starts from a different question: How do we process the information we attend to? The authors propose that performance under pressure can be understood in terms of the complexity of information processing. People may process information according to simpler rules—for example, by combining fewer pieces of information or by controlling a movement as one integrated unit.
Conversely, processing may become more complex when multiple pieces of information are combined or when individual movement components are controlled separately. Neither form of processing is inherently better. "Neither simplification nor complexity is automatically better.
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