The Big Mo' - Momentum In Sports

A player can feel it during a game when they hit a game-changing home run or when they go 0 for 4 at the plate. A team can feel it when they come back from a deficit late in the game or when their lead in the division vanishes. A fan can feel it as their team "catches fire" or goes "as cold as ice". And, play-by-play announcers love to talk about it. 

We know it as the "Big Mo", the "Hot Hand", and being "In The Zone" while the psychologists call it Psychological Momentum. But, does it really exist? Is it just a temporary shift in confidence and mood or does it actually change the outcome of a game or a season? As expected, there are lots of opinions available.

The Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science defines psychological momentum as, "the positive or negative change in cognition, affect, physiology, and behavior caused by an event or series of events that affects either the perceptions of the competitors or, perhaps, the quality of performance and the outcome of the competition. Positive momentum is associated with periods of competition, such as a winning streak, in which everything seems to ‘go right’ for the competitors. In contrast, negative momentum is associated with periods, such as a losing streak, when everything seems to ‘go wrong’." 

The interesting phrase in this definition is that Psychological Momentum (PM) "affects either the perceptions of the competitors or, perhaps, the quality of performance and the outcome of the competition." Most of the analyses on PM focus on the quantitative side to try to prove or disprove PM's affect on individual stats or team wins and losses.

Regarding PM in baseball, a Wall St. Journal article looked at last year's MLB playoffs, only to conclude there was no affect on postseason play coming from team momentum at the end of the regular season. More recently, Another Cubs Blog also looked at momentum into this year's playoffs including opinion from baseball stats guru, Bill James, another PM buster. For basketball, Thomas Gilovich's 1985 research into streaky, "hot hand" NBA shooting is the foundation for most of today's arguments against the existence of PM, or at least its affect on outcomes.

This view that if we can't see it in the numbers, more than would be expected, then PM does not exist may not capture the whole picture. Lee Crust and Mark Nesti have recommended that researchers look at psychological momentum more from the qualitative side. Maybe there are more subjective measures of athlete or team confidence that contribute to success that don't show up in individual stats or account for teams wins and losses. 

As Jeff Greenwald put it in his article, Riding the Wave of Momentum, "The reason momentum is so powerful is because of the heightened sense of confidence it gives us -- the most important aspect of peak performance. There is a term in sport psychology known as self-efficacy, which is simply a player's belief in his/her ability to perform a specific task or shot. Typically, a player’s success depends on this efficacy. During a momentum shift, self-efficacy is very high and players have immediate proof their ability matches the challenge. As stated earlier, they then experience subsequent increases in energy and motivation, and gain a feeling of control. In addition, during a positive momentum shift, a player’s self-image also changes. He/she feels invincible and this takes the "performer self" to a higher level."

There would seem to be three distinct areas of focus for PM; an individual's performance within a game, a team's performance within a game and a team's performance across a series of games. So, what are the relationships between these three scenarios? Does one player's scoring streak or key play lift the team's PM, or does a close, hard-fought team win rally the players' morale and confidence for the next game? 

Seeing the need for a conceptual framework to cover all of these bases, Jim Taylor and Andrew Demick created their Multidimensional Model of Momentum in Sports, which is still the most widely cited model for PM. Their definition of PM, "a positive or negative change in cognition, affect, physiology, and behavior caused by an event or series of events that will result in a commensurate shift in performance and competitive outcome", leads to the six key elements to what they call the "momentum chain".

First, momentum shifts begin with a "precipitating event", like an interception or fumble recovery in football or a dramatic 3-point shot in basketball. The effect that this event has on each athlete varies depending on their own perception of the game situation, their self-confidence and level of self-efficacy to control the situation.

Second, this event leads to "changes in cognition, physiology, and affect." Again, depending on the athlete, his or her base confidence will determine how strongly they react to the events, to the point of having physiological changes like tightness and panic in negative situations or a feeling of renewed energy after positive events.

Third, a "change in behavior" would come from all of these internal perceptions. Coaches and fans would be able to see real changes in the style of play from the players as they react to the positive or negative momentum chain.

Fourth, the next logical step after behavior changes is to notice a "change in performance." Taylor and Demick note that momentum is the exception not the norm during a game. Without the precipitating event, there should not be noticeable momentum shifts.

Fifth, for sports with head to head competition, momentum is a two-way street and needs a "contiguous and opposing change for the opponent." So, if after a goal, the attacking team celebrates some increased PM, but the defending team does not experience an equal negative PM, then the immediate flow of the game should remain the same. Its only when the balance of momentum shifts from one team to the other. Levels of experience in athletes has been shown to mitigate the effects of momentum, as veteran players can handle the ups and downs of a game better than novices.

Finally, at the end of the chain, if momentum makes it that far, there should be an immediate outcome change. When the pressure of a precipitating event occurs against a team, the players may begin to get out of their normal, confident flow and start to overanalyze their own performance and skills. We saw this in Dr. Sian Beilock's research in our article, Putt With Your Brain - Part 2. As an athlete's skills improve they don't need to consciously focus on them during a game. But pressure brought on by a negative event can take them out of this "automatic" mode as they start to focus on their mechanics to fix or reverse the problem. 

As Patrick Cohn, a sport psychologist, pointed out in a recent USA Today article on momentum, "You stop playing the game you played to be in that position. And the moment you switch to trying not to screw up, you go from a very offensive mind-set to a very defensive mind-set. If you're focusing too much on the outcome, it's difficult to play freely. And now they're worried more about the consequences and what's going to happen than what they need to do right now."

There is no doubt that we will continue to hear references to momentum swings during games. When you do, you can conduct your own mini experiment and watch the reactions of the players and the teams over the next section of the game to see if that "precipitating event" actually leads to a game-changing moment.

Jim Taylor, Andrew Demick (1994). A multidimensional model of momentum in sports Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 6 (1), 51-70 DOI: 10.1080/10413209408406465

Retirement Rebound - The Return of Torres, Favre and Armstrong

Maybe its the fear of turning 40. Maybe its the feeling of unfinished business. Maybe its the fire in the belly that has not quite extinguished. For retired elite athletes, the itch is always there to make a return after experiencing "life after sport". For some, it becomes too strong to ignore. 

This year has seen the return of at least three champions, Dara Torres, Lance Armstrong and Brett Favre. As they explain their individual reasons for coming back, some similarities emerge that have more to do with psychological needs than practical needs. In a recent Miami Herald article, Torres explained her comeback to competitive swimming at age 41, "For me, it's not like I sat around and watched swimming on TV and thought, `Oh, I wish I was still competing'. It was more gradual. But all of a sudden, something goes off inside you and you start seriously thinking about a comeback. You'd think the competitive fire would die down with maturity, but I've actually gotten worse. I wasn't satisfied with silver medals. I hate to lose now more than I did in my 20s. I'm still trying to figure out why.''

Drawing inspiration from Torres, Lance Armstrong has decided to make a comeback at age 37 with a declared goal to win his eighth Tour de France. In a recent Vanity Fair article, he described his rationale, “Look at the Olympics. You have a swimmer like Dara Torres. Even in the 50-meter event [freestyle], the 41-year-old mother proved you can do it. The woman who won the marathon [Constantina Tomescu-Dita, of Romania] was 38. Older athletes are performing very well. Ask serious sports physiologists and they’ll tell you age is a wives’ tale. Athletes at 30, 35 mentally get tired. They’ve done their sport for 20, 25 years and they’re like, I’ve had enough. But there’s no evidence to support that when you’re 38 you’re any slower than when you were 32."

Is it the 40 factor? Brett Favre, who turns 39 in October, made his well-publicized return to the NFL last month wanting to return so badly that he accepted a trade to the New York Jets so that he could play. His public and emotional decision to retire in March, only to begin hinting at a comeback in early summer showed the internal struggle he had with stepping away from sports. 

You could hear the indecision in his retirement press conference, "I've given everything I possibly can give to this organization, to the game of football, and I don't think I've got anything left to give, and that's it.", Favre said. "I know I can play, but I don't think I want to. And that's really what it comes down to. Fishing for different answers and what ifs and will he come back and things like that, what matters is it's been a great career for me, and it's over. As hard as that is for me to say, it's over. There's only one way for me to play the game, and that's 100 percent. Mike and I had that conversation the other night, and I will wonder if I made the wrong decision. I'm sure on Sundays, I will say I could be doing that, I should be doing that. I'm not going to sit here like other players maybe have said in the past that I won't miss it, because I will. But I just don't think I can give anything else, aside from the three hours on Sundays, and in football you can't do that. It's a total commitment, and up to this point I have been totally committed." 

Some observers point to the end of the Packers' 2007-2008 season with a heart-wrenching Favre interception in overtime that sent the Giants to the Super Bowl instead of Green Bay. Being that close to the pinnacle of his sport must have been confidence that his skills had not diminished and once the fatigue of the past season had passed (by about June), that he was not ready to just ride the tractor in Mississippi for the next 40 years.

So, what do the sport psychologists make of these second thoughts? These three athletes are world famous, but what about the hundreds of professional athletes that have had to make the same decision without all of the front page stories and fanfare? Why does Chris Chelios, all-star and future Hall of Famer in the NHL, continue to avoid the retirement decision at age 45? 

Coaches aren't immune either. Bobby Bowden of Florida State and Joe Paterno of Penn State have refused to retire to the point of becoming an awkward story for their schools and fans. ''After all the adulation and excitement wear off and elite athletes come face to face with retirement and a more mundane life, they suffer a sense of loss, almost like a death,'' said sport psychologist John F. Murray. "If you're Lance Armstrong, you realize that what you are is a cyclist, that is your identity, and if you feel you have one or two more titles in you, why let it go? Why not tackle unresolved challenges? Competing at that level provides a high that is hard to match. How can you not be addicted to that?''

Beyond the professional ranks, thousands of college and Olympic athletes are left with the realization that they face similar decisions of when to "give up the dream" and move into the more practical world of finishing their education and finding a job. Their emotional attachment to their sport has developed over years of building an identity linked to their success on the field. 

Despite the statistics showing the "funnel effect" of the diminishing number of athletes getting to the "next level", younger athletes continue to believe they are the ones that will make it to the top. There is also the more emotional issue of unwillingly leaving a sport because of injury or simply not making the team due to diminished skills. Dr. Murray adds, "When your whole life has been geared toward athletic excellence, the prospects of retirement can be dreadful! This is commonplace at collegiate level where 99 per cent of the athletes do not go on to play their sport professionally. Counseling is a way to prepare athletes for the inevitable loss that occurs after the glory is over and only memories remain. As with any loss, people need effective ways to cope. Going at it all on your own might work for some, but I’ll submit that the vast majority of athletes benefit from early discussion and planning for retirement. There is definitely life after sport."

Some colleges and universities, as well as some professional teams, have started to offer formal "retirement planning" for athletes as their formal sport careers wind down. Life After Sports, a counseling firm started by Adrian McBride, a former college and NFL player, provides services to retiring college athletes to help them emotionally and practically adjust to a post-sports life. The University of North Carolina has set-up the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes to offer a home for academic research into these issues.

Additional academic research is also coming out on athlete retirement including two articles this year (see citations below) from the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. First, Katie Warriner and David Lavallee of the University of Wales interviewed former elite gymnasts regarding their retirement at a relatively young age from competitive sport. They found the loss of identity to be the biggest adjustment. Second, Patricia Lally and Gretchen Kerr looked at how parents cope with their children's "retirement" from sport, as they also go through withdrawl symptoms when the "end of the dream" finally comes and the lifelong ambition for their child's athletic success is over.

Who's next up for a retirement rebound? Just as Lance got inspiration from Torres and maybe Favre, the trend may continue. The Bulls could use Jordan or Pippen and Roger Clemens is never far away from a phone. Stay tuned!





Katie Warriner, David Lavallee (2008). The Retirement Experiences of Elite Female Gymnasts: Self Identity and the Physical Self Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 20 (3), 301-317 DOI: 10.1080/10413200801998564

Patricia Lally, Gretchen Kerr (2008). The Effects of Athlete Retirement on Parents Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 20 (1), 42-56 DOI: 10.1080/10413200701788172

Putt With Your Brain - Part 2

If there is a poster child sport for our favorite phrase, "Sports Are 80 Percent Mental", it must be golf. Maybe its the slow pace of play that gives us plenty of time to think between shots. Maybe its the "on stage" performance feeling we get when we step up to that first tee in front of our friends (or strangers!) Maybe its the "high" of an amazing approach shot that lands 3 feet from the cup followed by the "low" of missing the birdie putt. 

From any angle, a golf course is the sport psychologist's laboratory to study the mix of emotions, confidence, skill execution and internal cognitive processes that are needed to avoid buying rounds at the 19th hole. Last time, we looked at some of the recent research on putting mechanics, but, as promised, we now turn to the mental side of putting. Sian Beilock and her team at the University of Chicago's Human Performance Lab recently released the latest of a string of research studies on sports performance, or more specifically, how not to choke under pressure. Lucky for us, they chose putting as their sport skill of choice. This ties in with Dr. Beilock's theory of embodied cognition that we featured in Watching Sports Is Good For Your Brain.

An underlying theme to this work is the concept of automaticity, or the ability to carry out sport skills without consciously thinking about them. Performing below expectations (i.e. choking) starts when we allow our minds to step out of this automatic mode and start thinking about the steps to our putting stroke and all of those "swing thoughts" that come with it ("keep your elbows in", "head down", "straight back").

Our brain over analyzes and second-guesses the motor skills we have learned from hundreds of practice putts. Previously, we looked at automaticity in other sports. Of course, a key distinction to the definition of choking is that you are playing "well below expectations". If you normally shoot par, but now start missing easy putts, then there may be distractions that are taking you out of your normal flow. Choking implies a temporary and abnormal event. Automaticity theory would claim that it is these distractions from some perceived pressure to perform that are affecting your game.

Most research into sport skill performance divides the world into two groups, novices and experts. Most sports have their own measures of where the dividing line is between these groups. Expertise would imply performance results not just experience. So, a golfer who has been hacking away for 20 years but still can't break 100 would still be put in the "novice" category.

Sport scientists design experiments that compare performance between the groups given some variables, and then hypothesize on the reason for the observed differences. Beilock, et al have looked at golf putting from several different angles over the years. Their research builds on itself, so let's review in reverse chronological order.

Back in 2001, they began by comparing the two competing theories of choking, distraction theory vs. explicit monitoring theory, and designed a putting experiment to find the better explanation. Distraction theory explains choking by assuming that the task of putting requires your direct attention and that high pressure situations will cause you to perform dual tasks - focus on your putting but also think about the pressure. This theory assumes there is no automaticity in skill learning and that we have to focus our attention on the skill every time.

Explicit monitoring theory claims that over time, as we practice a skill to the point of becoming an "expert", we proceduralize the task so that it becomes "automatic". Then, during a high pressure situation, our brain becomes so concerned about performance that it takes us out of automatic mode and tries to focus on each step of the task. The research supported the explicit monitoring theory as it was shown that the golf putting task was affected by distractions and pressure for the experts but not the novice putters.

So, how do we block out the pressure, so that our automaticity can kick in? Another 2001 study by Beilock looked at mental imagery during putting. Using the same explicit monitoring theory, should we try to think positive thoughts, like "this ball is going in the hole" or "I have made this putt many times"? Also, what happens if a stray negative thought, "don't miss this one!" enters our brain? Should we try to suppress it and replace it with happy self-talk? She set up four groups, one receiving positive comments, one receiving negative comments, one receiving negative comments followed by positive comments and one receiving none as a control group.

As expected, the happy people did improve their putting over the course of the trials, while the negative imagery hurt performance. But, the negative replaced with positive thought group did not show any more improvement over the control group. So, when faced with a high pressure, stressful situation ripe with the possibilities of choking, try to repeat positive thoughts, but don't worry too much if the occasional doubt creeps in.

Our strategy towards putting should also vary depending on our current skill level. While learning the intricacies of putting, novices should use different methods than experts, according to a 2004 study by Beilock, et al. Novice golfers need to pay attention to the step by step components of their swing, and they perform better when they do focus on the declarative knowledge required. 

Expert golfers, however, have practiced their swing or putt so often that it has become "second nature" to the point that if they are told to focus on the individual components of their swing, they perform poorly. The experiment asked both novices and expert golfers to first focus on their actual putting stroke by saying the word "straight" when hitting the ball and to notice the alignment of the putter face with the ball. Next, they were asked to putt while also listening for a certain tone played in the background. When they heard the tone they were to call it out while putting. 

The first scenario, known as "skill-focused", caused the novices to putt more accurately but the experts to struggle. The second scenario, called "dual-task", distracted the novices enough to affect their putts, while the experts were not bothered and their putting accuracy was better. Beilock showed that novices need the task focus to succeed while they are learning to putt, while experts have internalized the putting stroke so that even when asked to do two things, the putting stroke can be put on "auto-pilot".

Finally, in 2008, Beilock's team added one more twist to this debate. Does a stress factor even affect a golfer's performance in their mind before they putt? This time, golfers, divided into the usual novice and expert groups, were asked to first imagine or "image execute" themselves making a putt followed by an actual putt. The stress factor was to perform one trial under a normal, "take all the time you need" time scenario and then another under a speeded or time-limited scenario. 

The novices performed better under the non-hurried scenario in imagining the putt first followed by the actual putt. The experts, however, actually did better in the hurried scenario and worse in the relaxed setting. Again, the automaticity factor explains the differences between the groups.

The bottom line throughout all of these studies is that if you're learning to play golf, which includes putting, you should focus on your swing/stroke but beware of the distractions which will take away your concentration. That seems pretty logical, but for those that normally putt very well, if you feel stress to sink that birdie putt, don't try to focus in on the mechanics of your stroke. Trust the years of experience that has taught your brain the combination of sensorimotor skills of putting.

Just remember the Chevy Chase/Ty Webb philosophy; "I'm going to give you a little advice. There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.... Nah-na-na-na, Ma-na-na-na...."


Sian L. Beilock, Thomas H. Carr (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (4), 701-725 DOI: 10.1037//0096-3445.130.4.701

Sian L. Beilock; James A. Afremow; Amy L. Rabe; Thomas H. Carr (2001). "Don't Miss!" The Debilitating Effects of Suppressive Imagery on Golf Putting Performance Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 23 (3)

Beilock S.L.; Bertenthal B.I.; McCoy A.M.; Carr T.H. (2004). Haste does not always make waste: Expertise, direction of attention, and speed versus accuracy in performing sensorimotor skills Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11 (2), 373-379

Sian Beilock, Sara Gonso (2008). Putting in the mind versus putting on the green: Expertise, performance time, and the linking of imagery and action The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61 (6), 920-932 DOI: 10.1080/17470210701625626

Putt With Your Brain - Part 1

If Mark Twain thinks golf is "a good walk spoiled", then putting must be a brief pause to make you reconsider ever walking again. With about 50% of our score being determined on the green, we are constantly in search of the "secret" to getting the little white ball to disappear into the cup. Lucky for us, there is no shortage of really smart people also looking for the answer. The first 8 months of 2008 have been no exception, with a golf cart full of research papers on just the topic of putting. 

Is the secret in the mechanics of the putt stroke or maybe the cognitive set-up to the putt or even the golfer's psyche when stepping up to the ball? This first post will focus on the mechanical side and then we'll follow-up next time with a look inside the golfer's mind.

Let's start with a tip that most golf instructors would give, "Keep your head still when you putt". Jack Nicklaus said it in 1974, "the premier technical cause of missed putts is head movement" (from "Golf My Way") and Tiger Woods said it in 2001, "Every good putter keeps the head absolutely still from start to finish" (from "How I Play Golf"). Who would argue with the two greatest golfers of all time? His name is Professor Timothy Lee, from McMaster University, and he wanted to test that observation. So, he gathered two groups of golfers, amateurs with handicaps of 12-40, and professionals with scratch handicaps. Using an infrared tracking system, his team tracked the motion of the putter head and the golfer's head during sixty putts.

As predicted, the amateurs' head moved back in unison with their putter head, something Lee calls an "allocentric" movement, which agrees with the advice that novice golfers move their head. However, the expert golfers did not keep their head still, but rather moved their heads slightly in the opposite direction of the putter head. On the backswing, the golfer's head moved slightly forward; on the forward stroke, the head moved slightly backward. This "egocentric" movement may be the more natural response to maintain a centered, balanced stance throughout the stroke.

"The exact reasons for the opposite coordination patterns are not entirely clear," explains Lee. "However, we suspect that the duffers tend to just sway their body with the motions of the putter. In contrast, the good golfers probably are trying to maintain a stable, central body position by counteracting the destabilization caused by the putter backswing with a forward motion of the head. The direction of head motion is then reversed when the putter moves forward to strike the ball." Does that mean that pro golfers like Tiger are not keeping their heads still? No, just that you may not have to keep your head perfectly still to putt effectively.

So, what if you do have the bad habit of moving your head? Just teach yourself to change your putting motion and you will be cutting strokes off of your score, right? Well, not so fast. Simon Jenkins of Leeds Metropolitan University tested 15 members of the PGA European Tour to see if they could break old physical habits during putting. His team found that players who usually use shoulder movement in their putting action were not able to change their ways even when instructed to use a different motion. Old habits die hard.

Let's say you do keep your head still (nice job!), but you still 3-putt most greens? What's the next step on the road to birdie putts? Of the three main components of a putt, (angle of the face of the putter head on contact, putting stroke path and the impact point on the putter), which has the greatest effect on success? Back in February, Jon Karlsen of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, asked 71 elite golfers (mean handicap of 1.8) to make a total of 1301 putts (why not just 1300?) from about 12 feet to find out. His results showed that face angle was the most important (80%), followed by putter path (17%) and impact point (3%).

OK, forget the moving head thing and work on your putter blade angle at contact and you will be taking honors at every tee. Wait, Jon Karlsen came back in July with an update. This time he compared green reading, putting technique and green surface inconsistencies to see which of those variables we should discuss with our golf pro. Forty-three expert golfers putted 50 times from varying distances. Results showed that green reading (60%) was the most dominant factor for success with technique (34%) and green inconsistency (6%) trailing significantly.

So, after reading all of this, all you really need is something like the BreakMaster, which will help you read the breaks and the slope to the hole! Then, keep the putter blade square to the ball and don't move your head, at least not in an allocentric way, that is if you can break your bad habit of doing it. No problem, right? Well, next time we'll talk about your brain's attitude towards putting and all the ways your putt could go wrong before you even hit it!



Timothy D. Lee, Tadao Ishikura, Stefan Kegel, Dave Gonzalez, Steven Passmore (2008). Head–Putter Coordination Patterns in Expert and Less Skilled Golfers Journal of Motor Behavior, 40 (4), 267-272 DOI: 10.3200/JMBR.40.4.267-272


Jenkins, Simon (2008). Can Elite Tournament Professional Golfers Prevent Habitual Actions in Their Putting Actions? International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 3 (1), 117-127


Jon Karlsen, Gerald Smith, Johnny Nilsson (2007). The stroke has only a minor influence on direction consistency in golf putting among elite players Journal of Sports Sciences, 26 (3), 243-250 DOI: 10.1080/02640410701530902

Watching Sports Is Good For Your Brain

When was the last time you listened to a sporting event on the radio? If given a choice between watching the game on a big screen plasma in HD or turning on the AM radio, most of us would probably choose the visual sensation of television. But, for a moment, think about the active attention you need in order to listen to a radio broadcast and interpret the play-by-play announcer's descriptions. As you hear the words, your "mind's eye" paints the picture of the action so you can imagine the scene and situations. Your knowledge of the game, either from playing it or watching it for years helps you understand the narrative, the terms and the game's "lingo".


Now, imagine that you are listening to a broadcast about a sport you know nothing about. Hearing Bob Uecker or Vin Scully say, "With two out in the ninth, the bases are loaded and the Brewers' RBI leader has two strikes. The infield is in as the pitcher delivers. Its a hard grounder to third that he takes on the short hop and fires a bullet to first for the final out." If you have no baseball-specific knowledge, those sentences are meaningless. 

However, for those of us that have grown up with baseball, that description makes perfect sense and our mind's eye helped us picture the scene. That last sentence about the "hard grounder" and the thrown "bullet" may have even triggered some unconscious physical movements by you as your brain interpreted those action phrases. That sensorimotor reaction is at the base of what is called "embodied cognition". 
 
Sian Beilock, associate professor of psychology and leader of the Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago, defined the term this way: "In contrast to traditional views of the mind as an abstract information processor, recent work suggests that our representations of objects and events are grounded in action. That is, our knowledge is embodied, in the sense that it consists of sensorimotor information about potential interactions that objects or events may allow." She cites a more complete definition of the concept in Six Views of Embodied Cognition by Margaret Wilson. Another terrific overview of the concept is provided by science writer Drake Bennet of the Boston Globe in his article earlier this year, "Don't Just Stand There, Think".


In a study released yesterday, "Sports Experience Changes the Neural Processing of Action Language", Dr. Beilock's team continued their research into the link between our learned motor skills and our language comprehension about those motor skills. Since embodied cognition connects the body with our cognition, the sports domain provides a logical domain to study it.


Their initial look at this concept was in a 2006 study titled, "Expertise and its embodiment: Examining the impact of sensorimotor skill expertise on the representation of action-related text", where the team designed an experiment to compare the knowledge representation skill of experienced hockey players and novices. Each group first read sentences describing both hockey-related action and common, "every-day" action, (i.e. "the referee saw the hockey helmet on the bench" vs. "the child saw the balloon in the air"). They were then shown pictures of the object mentioned in the sentences and were asked if the picture matched the action in the sentence they read.

Both groups, the athletes and the novices, responded equally in terms of accuracy and response time to the everyday sentences and pictures, but the athletes responded significantly faster to the hockey-specific sentences and pictures. The conclusion is that those with the sensorimotor experience of sport give them an advantage of processing time over those that have not had that same experience.


Now, you may be saying, "Ya' think!?" to this somewhat obvious statement that people who have played hockey will respond faster to sentence/picture relationships about hockey than non-hockey players. Stay with us here for a minute, as the 2006 study set the groundwork for Beilock's team to take the next step with the question, "is there any evidence that the athletes are using different parts of their brain when processing these match or no match decisions?" The link between our physical skill memory and our language comprehension would be at the base of the embodied cognition theory. 

So, in the latest research, the HPL team kept the same basic experimental design, but now wanted to watch the participants' brain activity using fMRI scanning. This time, there were three groups, hockey players, avid fans of hockey and novices who had no playing or viewing experience with hockey at all. First, all groups passively listened to sentences about hockey actions and also sentences about everyday actions while being monitored by fMRI.  Second, outside of the fMRI scanner, they again listened to hockey-related and everyday-related action sentences and then were shown pictures of hockey or every day action and asked if there was a match or mis-match between the sentence and the picture.


This comprehension test showed similar results as in 2006, but now the team could try to match the relative skill in comprehension to the neural activity shown in the fMRI scans when listening. Both the players and the fans showed increased activity in the left dorsal premotor cortex, a region thought to support the selection of well-learned action plans and procedures. 

You might be surprised that the fans' brains showed activity in the same regions as the athletes. We saw this effect in a previous post, "Does Practice Make Perfect", where those that practiced a new dance routine and those that only watched it showed similar brain area activity. On the other side, the total novices showed activity in the bilateral primary sensory-motor cortex, an area typically known for carrying out step by step instructions for new or novel tasks. 

So, the interesting finding here is that those with experience, either playing or watching, are actually calling on additional neural networks in their brains to help their normal language comprehension abilities. In other words, the memories of learned actions are linked and assist other cognitive tasks. That sounds pretty much like the definition of embodied cognition and Dr. Beilock's research has helped that theory take another step forward. In her words, "Experience playing and watching sports has enduring effects on language understanding by changing the neural networks that support comprehension to incorporate areas active in performing sports skills."


Take pride in your own brain the next time you hear, "Kobe dribbles the ball to the top of the key, crosses over, drives the lane, and finger rolls over Duncan for two." If you can picture that play in your mind, your left dorsal premotor cortex just kicked into gear!









S. L. Beilock, I. M. Lyons, A. Mattarella-Micke, H. C. Nusbaum, S. L. Small (2008). Sports experience changes the neural processing of action language Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0803424105


Lauren E. Holt, Sian L. Beilock (2006). Expertise and its embodiment: Examining the impact of sensorimotor skill expertise on the representation of action-related text Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13 (4), 694-701 PMID: 17201372

Starbucks' Secret Sports Supplement

For an athlete, it seems to good to be true. A "sports supplement" that increases alertness, concentration, reaction time and focus while decreasing muscle fatigue or at least the perception of fatigue. It can even shorten recovery time after a game. HGH? EPO? Steroids? Nope, just a grande cup of Juan Valdez's Best, Liquid Lightning, Morning Mud, Wakey Juice, Mojo, Java, aka coffee. Actually, the key ingredient is caffeine which has been studied repeatedly for its ergogenic (performance-enhancing) benefits in sports, both mentally and physically. Time after time, caffeine proves itself as a relatively safe, legal and inexpensive boost to an athlete.

Or does it? If caffeine is such a clear cut performance enhancing supplement, why did the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), who also monitors this month's Beijing Olympics for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), first add caffeine to its banned substance list, only to remove it in 2004? At the time that it was placed on the banned list, the threshold for a positive caffeine test was set to a post-exercise urinary caffeine concentration of 12 µg/ml (about 3-4 cups of strong coffee). However, more recent research has shown that caffeine has ergogenic effects at levels as low as the equivalent of 1-2 cups of coffee. So, it was hard for WADA to know where to draw the line between athletes just having a few morning cups of coffee/tea or maybe some chocolate bars and athletes that were intentionally consuming caffeine to increase their performance level. However, caffeine is still on the WADA monitoring list as a substance to screen for and watch for patterns of use.


Meanwhile, athletes are still convinced that caffeine helps them.
In a recent survey from Liverpool John Moores University, 480 athletes were interviewed about their caffeine use. One third of track and field athletes and 60% of cyclists reported using caffeine specifically to give them a boost in competition. In addition, elite-level athletes interviewed were more likely to rely on caffeine than amateurs. Dr. Neil Chester, co-leader of the study, commented about the confusion created by the WADA status change for caffeine, "There's been a lack of communication from WADA and there is a question about whether or not sporting authorities are condoning its use. Ultimately there is a need to clarify the use of caffeine within the present anti-doping legislation."

So, have athletes found a loophole to exploit that gives them an edge? Dr. Carrie Ruxton recently completed a literature survey to summarize 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled trials published over the past 15 years to establish what range of caffeine consumption would maximize benefits and minimize risk for cognitive function, mood, physical performance and hydration. The studies were divided into two categories, those that looked at the cognitive effects and those that looked at physical performance effects. The results concluded that there was a significant improvement in cognitive functions like attention, reaction time and mental processing as well as physical benefits described as increased "time to exhaustion" and decreased "perception of fatigue" in cycling and running tests. Longer, endurance type exercise showed greater results than short-term needs for energy.

Given these results, how exactly does caffeine perform these wonderful tricks? Dr. Ruxton explains from the study, "Caffeine is believed to impact on mood and performance by inhibiting the binding of both adenosine and benzodiazepine receptor ligands to brain membranes. As these neurotransmitters are known to slow down brain activity, a blockade of their receptors lessens this effect. " Bottom line, the chemicals in your brain that would cause you to feel tired are blocked, giving you a feeling of ongoing alertness. Your body still needs the sleep, caffeine just delays the feeling of being tired.

As to the physiological benefits, caffeine has also been shown to stimulate the release of fat into the bloodstream. The early conclusion was that the increased free fatty acids in the blood would allow our muscles to use fat as fuel and spare glycogen (carbohydrates) allowing us to exercise longer. Another theory is that caffeine stimulates the central nervous system reducing our perception of effort so that we feel that we can continue at an increased pace for longer periods.

The discussion on glycogen has recently taken another interesting twist; caffeine's apparent ability to replenish glycogen (the body's primary fuel source) more rapidly after an intense workout. A team at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research has found that athletes who consumed a combination of carbohydrates and caffeine following an exhaustive exercise had 66% more glycogen in their muscles four hours later, compared to when they consumed carbohydrates alone. 

They asked cyclists to pedal to exhaustion in the lab, then gave them a drink that contained either carbohydrates with caffeine or just carbohydrates (the cyclists did not know which drink they were getting). They repeated the process 7-10 days later and reversed the groups. Muscle biopsies and blood samples were tested for levels of glycogen after each trial period. The researchers did not have an explanation for the increased levels of glycogen resulting from the caffeine-spiked juice. One theory is the higher circulating blood glucose and plasma insulin levels caused by the caffeine were key factors. In addition, caffeine may increase the activity of several signaling enzymes, including the calcium-dependent protein kinase and protein kinase B (also called Akt), which have roles in muscle glucose uptake during and after exercise.

So, before you start drinking the Starbucks by the gallon, here are some guidelines. You can consume 2-2.5 mg of caffeine per pound of body weight daily to achieve its ergogenic effects. This equates to 250-312 mg for a 125-pound woman and 360-450 mg for a 180-pound man. More is not better, as other research has shown a decline in benefit and an increase in caffeine's side effects beyond this level. One "grande" cup (16 oz.) of Starbucks coffee contains about 320-500 mg of caffeine, while a 12 oz. can of soda will provide 35-70 mg of caffeine. Maybe we'll see the ultimate sports drink soon, kind of like Monster meets Gatorade... wait, its already here: Lucozade Sport with Caffeine Boost!







C. H. S. Ruxton (2008). The impact of caffeine on mood, cognitive function, performance and hydration: a review of benefits and risks Nutrition Bulletin, 33 (1), 15-25 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-3010.2007.00665.x

N. Chester, N. Wojek (2008). Caffeine Consumption Amongst British Athletes Following Changes to the 2004 WADA Prohibited List International Journal of Sports Medicine, 29 (6), 524-528 DOI: 10.1055/s-2007-989231

D. J. Pedersen, S. J. Lessard, V. G. Coffey, E. G. Churchley, A. M. Wootton, T. Ng, M. J. Watt, J. A. Hawley (2008). High rates of muscle glycogen resynthesis after exhaustive exercise when carbohydrate is coingested with caffeine Journal of Applied Physiology, 105 (1), 7-13 DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.01121.2007

Imagine Winning Gold In Beijing

Imagine winning a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics.  No really, go ahead, close your eyes and visualize it.  What did you see?  Were you standing on the medal platform looking out at the crowd, waving and taking in the scene through your own eyes, or were you a spectator in the crowd watching yourself getting the medal put around your neck?  This choice between "first-person" or "third-person" visualization actually makes a difference on our motivation to achieve a future goal.


Noelia A. Vasquez, at York University and Roger Buehler, at Wilfrid Laurier University wanted to see if there was a link between our visualization perspective and our motivation level to achieve the imagined goal.  They asked 47 university students to imagine the successful completion of a performance task that was in their near future, whether it be a speech in a class or an upcoming athletic competition.  They were also asked to assume that the task went extremely well.  One group of students were asked to imagine this scene "through their own eyes" seeing the environment as they would actually experience it.  The second group was told to use the third-person perspective, pretending they were "in the crowd" watching themselves as others would see them achieving this goal.  Next, they were given a survey that asked each group how motivated they were to now go make this successful scene a reality. 


As hypothesized, the group that saw the scene through their audience's eyes (third-person) ranked their motivation to now succeed significantly higher than those that imagined it through their own eye (first-person).  The authors' explanation for this is the perceived additional importance attached to the task when we consider other peoples' opinion of us and our natural desire to increase our status in our peer group.  Seeing this newly elevated social acceptance and approval of ourselves from the eyes of our peers motivates us even more to reach for our goals.


The road to achievements like an Olympic gold medal is a long one with many steps along the way.  Over the years, as athletes maintain their training regimen, they can keep imagining the future goal, but they may need to also look back and recognize the improvements they have made over time.  This "progress to date" assessment will also provide motivation to keep going once they realize the hard work is actually having the desired effect and moving them along the desired path.  So, as they review their past to present progress, does the first or third person perspective make a difference there as well?



Researchers from Cornell, Yale and Ohio State, led by Thomas Gilovich, professor of psychology at Cornell, designed an experiment to find out.  They recruited a group of university students who had described their high-school years as "socially awkward" to now recall those years and compare them with their social skill in college.  The first group was asked to recall the past from a first-person perspective, just as their memories would provide them.  The second group was asked to remember themselves through the perspective of their classmates (third-person).  Next, each group was asked to assess the personal change they had accomplished since then.


As predicted, the group that had recalled their former selves in the third person reported greater progress and change towards a more social and accepted person in college than the group that remembered in the first-person.  "We have found that perspective can influence your interpretation of past events. In a situation in which change is likely, we find that observing yourself as a third person -- looking at yourself from an outside observer's perspective -- can help accentuate the changes you've made more than using a first-person perspective," says Gilovich.  "When participants recalled past awkwardness from a third-person perspective, they felt they had changed and were now more socially skilled," said Lisa K. Libby, an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University. "That led them to behave more sociably and appear more socially skilled to the research assistant."


So, whether looking forward or backward, seeing yourself through other's eyes seems to provide more motivation to not only continue the road to success, but to appreciate the progress you have made. 


Then the actual day of competition arrives.  It is one hour before you take your position on the starting blocks at the "Bird's Nest" stadium in Beijing or on the mat at the National Indoor Stadium for the gymnastics final.  Should you be imagining the medal ceremony and listening to your country's national anthem at that point?  In a recent Denver Post article, Peter Haberl, senior sports psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee says, "It takes a great deal of ability and skill to stay focused on the task at hand."  

He distinguishes between an "outcome" goal, (receiving the medal) and "performance" (improving scores/times) and "process" (improving technique) goals.  "The difference is that these types of goals are much more under the control of the athlete," explains Haberl. "The process goal, in particular, directs attention to the here and now, which allows the athlete to totally focus on the doing of the activity; this is key to performing well.  This sounds simple but it really is quite difficult because the mind takes you to the past and the future all the time, particularly in the Olympic environment with its plethora of distractions and enticing rewards." 


Mental imagery is a well-known tool for every athlete to make distant and difficult goals seem attainable.  By seeing your future accomplishments through the eyes of others, you can attach more importance and reward to achieving them.  Just imagine yourself in London in 2012!



Vasquez, N.A. (2007). Seeing Future Success: Does Imagery Perspective Influence Achievement Motivation?. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(10), 1392-1405.


Libby, L.K., Eibach, R.P., Gilovich, T. (2005). Here's Looking at Me: The Effect of Memory Perspective on Assessments of Personal Change.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(1), 50-62. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.88.1.50

Lifting The Fog Of Sports Concussions

A concussion, clinically known as a Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI), is one of the most common yet least understood sports injuries.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are as many as 300,000 sports and recreation-related concussions each year in the U.S., yet the diagnosis, immediate treatment and long-term effects are still a mystery to most coaches, parents and even some clinicians.  

The injury can be deceiving as there is rarely any obvious signs of trauma.  If the head is not bleeding and the player either does not lose consciouness or regains it after a brief lapse, the potential damage is hidden and the usual "tough guy" mentality is to "shake it off" and get back in the game.


Leigh Steinberg, agent and representative to some of the top professional athletes in the world (including NFL QBs Ben Roethlisberger and Matt Leinart), is tired of this ignorance and attitude.  "My clients, from the day they played Pop Warner football, are taught to believe ignoring pain, playing with pain and being part of the playing unit was the most important value," Steinberg said, "I was terrified at the understanding of how tender and narrow that bond was between cognition and consciousness and dementia and confusion".  Which is why he was the keynote speaker at last week's "New Developments in Sports-Related Concussions" conference hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Medical College Sport Medicine Department in Pittsburgh. 

Leading researchers gathered to discuss the latest research on sports-related concussions, their diagnosis and treatment.  "There's been huge advancement in this area," said Dr. Micky Collins, the assistant director for the UPMC Sports Medicine Program. "We've learned more in the past five years than the previous 50 combined."

So, what is a concussion?  The CDC defines a concussion as "a complex pathophysiologic process affecting the brain, induced by traumatic biomechanical forces secondary to direct or indirect forces to the head."  Being a "mild" form of traumatic brain injury, it is generally believed that there is no actual structural damage to the brain from a concussion, but more a disruption in the biochemistry and electrical processes between neurons.  

The brain is surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid, which is supposed to provide some protection from minor blows to the head.  However, a harder hit can cause rotational forces that affect a wide area of the brain, but most importantly the mid-brain and the reticular activating system which may explain the loss of consciousness in some cases.  

For some athletes, the concussion symptoms take longer to disappear in what is known as post-concussion syndrome.  It is not known whether this is from some hidden structural damage or more permanent disruption to neuronal activity.  Repeated concussions over time can lead to a condition known as dementia pugilistica, with long-term impairments to speech, memory and mental processing.

After the initial concussion, returning to the field before symptoms clear raises the risk of second impact syndrome, which can cause more serious, long-term effects.  As part of their "Heads Up" concussion awareness campaign, the CDC offers this video story of Brandon Schultz, a high school football player, who was not properly diagnosed after an initial concussion and suffered a second hit the following week, which permanently changed his life.  Without some clinical help, the player, parents and coach can only rely on the lack of obvious symptoms before declaring a concussion "healed".  

However, making this "return to play" decision is now getting some help from some new post-concussion tests.  The first is a neurological skills test called ImPACT (Immediate Post-Concussion and Cognitive Testing) created by the same researchers at UPMC.  It is an online test given to athletes after a concussion to measure their performance in attention span, working memory, sustained and selective attention time, response variability, problem solving and reaction time.  Comparing a "concussed" athlete's performance on the test with a baseline measurement will help the physician decide if the brain has healed sufficiently.

However, Dr. Collins and his team wanted to add physiological data to the psychological testing to see if there was a match between brain activity, skill testing and reported symptoms after a concussion.  In a study released last year in the journal Neurosugery, they performed functional MRI (fMRI) brain imaging studies on 28 concussed high-school athletes while they performed certain working memory tasks to see if there was a significant link between performance on the tests and changes in brain activation.  They were tested about one week after injury and again after the normal clinical recovery period.

“In our study, using fMRI, we demonstrate that the functioning of a network of brain regions is significantly associated with both the severity of concussion symptoms and time to recover,” said Jamie Pardini, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist on the clinical and research staff of the UPMC concussion program and co-author of the study.  
 "We identified networks of brain regions where changes in functional activation were associated with performance on computerized neurocognitive testing and certain post-concussion symptoms,” Dr. Pardini added. "Also, our study confirms previous research suggesting that there are neurophysiological abnormalities that can be measured even after a seemingly mild concussion.” 

Putting better assessment tools in the hands of athletic trainers and coaches will provide evidence-based coaching decisions that are best for the athlete's health.  Better decisions will also ease the minds of parents knowing their child has fully recovered from their "invisible" injury.




Lovell, M.R., Pardini, J.E., Welling, J., Collins, M.W., Bakal, J., Lazar, N., Roush, R., Eddy, W.F., Becker, J.T. (2007). FUNCTIONAL BRAIN ABNORMALITIES ARE RELATED TO CLINICAL RECOVERY AND TIME TO RETURN-TO-PLAY IN ATHLETES. Neurosurgery, 61(2), 352-360. DOI: 10.1227/01.NEU.0000279985.94168.7F

HGH - Human Growth Hoax?

Athletes, both professional and amateur, as well as the general public are convinced that human growth hormone (HGH), Erythropoietin (EPO) and anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) are all artificial and controversial paths to improved performance in sports.  The recent headlines that have included Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Floyd Landis, Dwayne Chambers, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens and many lesser known names (see the amazingly long list of doping cases in sport) have referred to these three substances interchangeably leaving the public confused about who took what from whom.  With so many athletes willing to gamble with their futures, they must be confident that they will see significant short-term results.  

So, is it worth the risk?  Two very interesting recent studies provide some answers on at least one of the substances, HGH.


A team at the Stanford University School of Medicine, led by Hau Liu MD, recently reviewed 27 historical studies on the effects of HGH on athletic performance, dating back to 1966 (see reference below).  They wanted to see if there were any definitive links between HGH use and improved results.  In some of the studies, test volunteers who received HGH did develop more lean body mass, but also developed more lactate during aerobic testing which inhibited rather than helped performance.  While their muscle mass increased, other markers of athletic fitness, such as VO2max remained unchanged.  “The key takeaway is that we don’t have any good scientific evidence that growth hormone improves athletic performance,” said senior author Andrew Hoffman, MD, professor of endocrinology, gerontology and metabolism.



Both Liu and Hoffman cautioned that the amounts of HGH given to these test subjects may be much lower than the the purported levels claimed to be taken by professional athletes.  They also pointed out that at a professional level, a very slight improvement might be all that is necessary to get an edge of your opponent.  Hoffman also added an insightful comment, “So much of athletic performance at the professional level is psychological.”  If an athlete takes HGH, sees some muscle mass growth and isn't 100% sure of its performance capabilities, might he assume he now has other "Superman" powers?



That is exactly the premise that a research team from Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia used to find out if HGH users simply relied on a placebo effect.  Sixty-four participants, young adult recreational athletes, were divided into two groups of 32 and tested for a baseline of athletic ability in endurance, strength, power and sprinting.  One group received growth hormone and the other group received a simple placebo.  It was a "double-blind" study in that neither the participants nor the researchers knew during the testing which substance each group received.



At the end of the 8 week treatment, the athletes were asked if they thought they were in the HGH group or the placebo group.  Half of the group that had received the placebo incorrectly guessed that they were on HGH.  Not too surprisingly, the majority of the "incorrect guessers" were men.  Here's where it gets interesting.  The incorrect guessers also thought that their athletic abilities had improved over the 8 week period.  The team retested all of the placebo group and actually did find improvement across all of the tests, but only significantly in the high-jump test.


Jennifer Hansen, a nurse researcher and Dr. Ken Ho, head of the pituitary research unit at Garvan have not released the data on the group that did receive the HGH, but they will in their final report coming soon.



So, let's recap.  On the one hand, we have a research review that claims there is not yet any scientific evidence that HGH actually improves sports performance.  Yet, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of athletes illegally using HGH for performance gain.  Showing the effect of the "if its good enough for them, its good enough for me" beliefs of the public regarding professional athlete use of HGH, we now have research that shows even those who received a placebo, but believed they were taking HGH not only thought they were improving but actually did improve a little.  Once again, we see the power of our own natural, non-supplemented brain to convince (or fool) ourselves to perform at higher levels than we thought possible.








Liu, H., Bravata, D.M., Olkin, I., Friedlander, A., Liu, V., Roberts, B., Bendavid, E., Saynina, O., Salpeter, S.R., Garber, A.M. (2008). Systematic review: the effects of growth hormone on athletic performance.. Annals of Internal Medicine, 148(10), 747-758.

Does Practice Make Perfect?

For years, sport science and motor control research has added support to the fundamental assertions that "practice makes perfect" and "repetition is the mother of habit".  Shooting 100 free throws, kicking 100 balls on goal or fielding 100 ground balls must certainly build the type of motor programs in the brain that will only help make the 101st play during the game.  K. Anders Ericsson, the "expert on experts", has defined the minimum amount of "deliberate practice" necessary to raise any novice to the level of expert as 10 years or 10,000 hours.

However, many questions still exist as to exactly how we learn these skills.  What changes happen in our brains when we teach ourselves a new task?  What is the most effective and efficient way to master a skill?  Do we have to be actually performing the skill to learn it, or could we just watch and learn? 

Then, once we have learned a new skill and can repeat it with good consistency, why can't we perform it perfectly every time?  Why can't we make every free throw, score with every shot on goal, and field each ground ball with no errors?  We would expect our brain to just be able to repeat this learned motor program with the same level of accuracy.
To answer these questions, we look at two recent studies.  The first, by a team at Dartmouth's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, led by Emily Cross, who is now a post-doc at Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, wanted to know if we need to physically perform a new task to learn it, or if merely observing others doing it would be enough. 

The "task" they chose was to learn new dance steps from a video game eerily similar to "Dance, Dance Revolution".  If you (or your kids) have never seen this game, its a video game that you actually get up off the couch and participate in, kind of like the Nintendo Wii.  In this game, a computer screen (or TV) shows you the dance moves and you have to imitate them on a plastic mat on the floor connected to the game.  If you make the right steps, timed to the music, you score higher.

Cross and the team "taught" their subjects in three groups.  The first group was able to view and practice the new routine.  The second group only was allowed to watch the new routine, but not physically practice it.  The third group was a control group that did not get any training at all.  The subjects were later scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they watched the same routine they had either learned (actively or passively) or not seen (the control group).

As predicted, they found that the two trained groups showed common activity in the Action Observance Network (AON) in the brain (see image on left), a group of neural regions found mostly in the inferior parietal and premotor cortices of the brain (near the top of the head) responsible for motor skills and some memory functions.  In other words, whether they physically practised the new steps or just watched the new steps, the same areas of the brain were activated and their performance of the new steps were significantly similar.  The team put together a great video summarizing the experiment.  

One of the themes from this study is that, indeed, learning a motor skill takes place in the brain.  This may seem like an obvious statement, but its important to accept that the movements that our limbs make when performing a skill are controlled by the instructions provided from the brain.  So, what happens when the skill breaks down?  Why did the quarterback throw behind the receiver when we have seen him make that same pass accurately many times?  

To stay true to our theme, we have to blame the brain.  It may be more logical to point to a mechanical breakdown in the player's form or body movements, but the "set-up" for those movements starts with the mental preparation performed by the brain.

In the second study, electrical engineers at Stanford University took a look at these questions to try to identify where the inconsistencies of movement start.  They chose to focus on the "mental preparation" stage which occurs just before the actual movement.  During this stage, the brain plans the coordination and goal for the movement prior to initiating it.  The team designed a test where monkeys would reach for a green dot or a red dot.  If green, they were trained to reach slowly for the dot; if red, to reach quickly.  By monitoring the areas of the monkeys' brains through fMRI, they observed activity in the AON prior to the move and during the move.  

Over repeated trials, changes in reach speed were associated with changes in pre-movement activity.  So, instead of perfectly consistent reach times by the monkeys, they saw variation, like we might see when trying to throw strikes with a baseball many times in a row.  Their conclusion was that this planning activity in the brain does have an effect on the outcome of the activity.  Previously, research had focused only on breakdowns during the actual move and in the mechanics of muscles.  This study shows that the origin of the error may start earlier.

As electrical engineering Assistant Professor Krishna Shenoy stated, "the main reason you can't move the same way each and every time, such as swinging a golf club, is that your brain can't plan the swing the same way each time."  
Postdoctoral researcher and co-author Mark Churchland added, "The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again.  The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you've never done before." 
The Stanford team also has made a nice short video synopsis of their study.

Does practice make perfect?  First, we must define "practice".  We saw that it could be either active or passive.  Second, we know sports skills are never "perfect" all the time, and need to understand where the error starts before we can begin to fix it.

Play Better Golf By Playing Bigger Holes

Here are some quotes we have all heard (or said ourselves) on the golf course or at the ball diamond.

On a good day:
"It was like putting into the Grand Canyon"
"The baseball looked like a beach ball up there today"

On a bad day:
"The hole was as small as a thimble"
"I don't know, it looked like he was throwing marbles"

The baseball and the golf hole are the same size every day, so are these comments meaningless or do we really perceive these objects differently depending on the day's performance? And, does our performance influence our perception or does our perception help our performance?

Jessica Witt, an assistant professor of psychological science at the University of Virginia has made two attempts at the answer. First, in a 2005 study, "See the Ball, Hit the Ball", her team studied softball players by designing an experiment that tried to correlate perceived softball size to performance. She interviewed players immediately after a game and asked them to estimate the size of the softball by picking a circle off of a board that contained several different sizes. She then found out how that player had done at the plate that day. 

As expected, the players that were hitting well chose the larger sized circles to represent the ball size, while the underperforming hitters chose the smaller circles. The team was not able to answer the question of causality, so they expanded the research to other sports.

Fast forward to July, 2008 and Witt and her team have just released a very similar study focused on golf, "Putting to a bigger hole: Golf performance relates to perceived size". Using the same experiment format, players who had just finished a round of golf were asked to pick out the perceived size of the hole from a collection of holes that varied in diameter by a few centimeters. Once again, the players who had scored well that day picked the larger holes and vice versa for that day's hackers. So, the team came to the same conclusion that there is some relationship between perception and performance, but could not figure out the direction of the effect. Ideally, a player could "imagine" a larger hole and then play better because of that visual cue.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University may have the answer. In a study, "The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception", the team led by Joel Pearson, wanted to see what influence our "Mind's Eye" has on our actual perception. In their experiment, they asked volunteers to imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes. Then, they showed each person a pattern of green horizontal stripes in one eye and red vertical stripes in the other eye. This would induce what is known as the "binocular rivalry" condition where each image would fight for control of perception and would appear to alternate from one to the other. In this experiment, however, the subjects reported seeing the image they had first imagined more often. So, if they had imagined vertical stripes originally, they would report seeing the red vertical stripes predominantly.

The team concluded that mental imagery does have an influence over what is later seen. They also believe that the brain actually processes imagined mental images the same way it handles actual scenes. "More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there," Pearson says. "So there's more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing. Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see."

So, back to our sports example, if we were able to imagine a large golf hole or a huge baseball, this might affect our actual perception of the real thing and increase our performance. This link has not been tested, but its a step in the right direction. Another open question is the effect that our emotions and confidence have on our perceived task. That hole may look like the Grand Canyon, but the sand trap might look like the Sahara Desert!



Witt, J.K. (2008). Putting to a bigger hole: golf performance relates to perceived size. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15

Teaching Tactics and Techniques In Sports

You have probably seen both types of teams. Team A: players who are evenly spaced, calling out plays, staying in their positions only to watch them dribble the ball out of bounds, lose the pass, or shoot wildly at the goal. Team B: amazing ball control, skillful shooting and superior quickness, speed and agility but each player is a "do-it-yourselfer" since no one can remember a formation, strategy or position responsibility. Team A knows WHAT to do, but can't execute. Team B knows HOW to do it, but struggles with making good team play decisions. This is part of the ongoing balancing act of a coach. At the youth level, teaching technique first has been the tradition, followed by tactical training later and separately. More recently, there has been research on the efficiency of learning in sports and whether there is a third "mixed" option that yields better performance.


Earlier, we took an initial look at Dr. Joan Vickers' Decision Training model as an introduction to this discussion. In addition, Dr. Markus Raab of the Institute for Movement Sciences and Sport, University of Flensburg, Germany, (now of the Institute of Psychology, German Sport University in Cologne), took a look at four major models of teaching sports skills that agree that technical and tactical skills need to be combined for more effective long-term learning.Each of the four models vary in their treatment of learning along two different dimensions; implicit vs. explicit learning and domain-specific vs. domain-general environments. 


Types of Learning

Imagine two groups of boys playing baseball. The first group has gathered at the local ball diamond at the park with their bats, balls and gloves. No coaches, no parents, no umpires; just a group of friends playing an informal "pick-up" game of baseball. They may play by strict baseball rules, or they may improvise and make their own "home" rules, (no called strikes, no stealing, etc.). In the past, they may have had more formal coaching, but today is unstructured.


The second group is what we see much more often today. A team of players, wearing their practice uniforms are driven by their parents to team practice at a specific location and time to be handed off to the team coaches. The coaches have planned a 90 minute session that includes structured infield practice, then fly ball practice, then batting practice and finally some situational scrimmages. Rules are followed and coaching feedback is high. Both groups learn technical and tactical skills during their afternoon of baseball. They differ in the type of learning they experience.

The first group uses "implicit" learning while the second group uses "explicit" learning. Implicit learning is simply the lack of explicit teaching. It is "accidental" or "incidental" learning that soaks in during the course of our play. There is no coach teaching the first group, but they learn by their own trial and error and internalize the many if-then rules of technical and tactical skills. Explicit learning, on the other hand, is directed instruction from an expert who demonstrates proper technique or explains the tactic and the logic behind it.



An interesting test of whether a specific skill or piece of knowledge has been learned with implicit or explicit methods is to ask the athlete to describe or verbalize the details of the skill or sub-skill. If they cannot verbalize how they know what they know, it was most likely learned through implicit learning. However, if they can explain the team's attacking strategy for this game, for example, that most likely came from an explicit learning session with their coach.



Types of Domains

The other dimension that coaches could use in choosing the best teaching method is along the domain continuum. Some teaching methods work best to teach a skill that is specific to that sport's domain and the level of transferability to another sport is low. These methods are known as domain-specific. For more general skills that can be useful in several related sports, a method can be used known as domain-general.

Why would any coach choose a method that is not specific to their sport? There has been evidence that teaching at a more abstract level, using both implicit and explicit "play" can enhance future, more specific coaching. Also, remember our discussion about kids playing multiple sports.Based on these two dimensions, Dr. Raab looked at and summarized these four teaching models:

• Teaching Games for Understanding (TGFU)
• Decision Training (DT)
• Ball School (Ball)
• Situation Model of Anticipated Response consequences of Tactical training (SMART)

TGFU

The TGFU approach, (best described by Bunker, D.; Thorpe, R. (1982) A model for the teaching of games in the secondary school, Bulletin of Physical Education, 10, 9–16), is known for involving the athlete early in the "cognition" part of the game and combining it with the technical aspect of the game. Rather than learn "how-to" skills in a vacuum, TGFU argues that an athlete can tie the technical skill with the appropriate time and place to use it and in the context of a real game or a portion of the game.

This method falls into the explicit category of learning, as the purpose of the exercise is explained. However, the exercises themselves stress a more domain-general approach of more generic skills that can be transferred between related sports such as "invasion games" (soccer, football, rugby), "net games" (tennis, volleyball), "striking/fielding games" (baseball, cricket) and "target games" (golf, target shooting). 



Decision Training

The DT method, (best described by Vickers, J. N., Livingston, L. F., Umeris-Bohnert, S. & Holden, D. (1999) Decision training: the effects of complex instruction, variable practice and reduced delayed feedback on the acquisition and transfer of a motor skill, Journal of Sports Sciences, 17, 357–367), uses an explicit learning style but with a domain-specific approach. Please see my earlier post on Decision Training for details of the approach. 


Ball School

The Ball School approach, (best described by Kroger, C. & Roth, K. (1999) Ballschule: ein ABC fur Spielanfanger [Ball school: an ABC for game beginners] (Schorndorf, Hofmann), starts on the other end of both spectrums, in that it teaches generic domain-general skills using implicit learning. It emphasizes that training must be based on ability, playfullness, and skill-based. Matching the games to the group's abilities, while maintaining an unstructured "play" atmosphere will help teach generic skills like "hitting a target" or "avoiding defenders". 



SMART

Dr. Raab's own SMART model, (best described in Raab, M. (2003) Decision making in sports: implicit and explicit learning is affected by complexity of situation, International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1, 406–433), blends implicit and explicit learning within a domain-specific environment. The idea is that different sports' environmental complexity may demand either an implicit or explicit learning method. Raab had previously shown that skills learned implicitly work best in sport enviroments with low complexity. Skills learned explicitly will work best in highly complex environments. Complexity is measured by the number of variables in the sport. So, a soccer field has many moving parts, each with its own variables. So, the bottom line is to use the learning strategy that fits the sport's inherent difficulty. So, learning how to choose from many different skill and tactical options would work best if matched with the right domain-specific environment.  



Bottom-Line for Coaches

What does all of this mean for the coach? That there are several different models of instruction and that one size does not fit all situations. Coaches need an arsenal of tools to use based on the specific goals of the training session. In reality, most sports demand both implicit and explicit learning, as well as skills that are specific to one domain, and some that can transfer across several sport domains. Flexibility in the approach taken goes back to the evidence based coaching example we gave last time. Keeping an open mind about coaching methods and options will produce better prepared athletes.






(2007). Discussion. Physical Education & Sport Pedagogy, 12(1), 1-22. DOI: 10.1080/17408980601060184

The Coach's Curse - Mental Mistakes

"Donadoni rues Italian 'mistakes' against Dutch"

"Mental errors cost Demons in regional quarterfinal"

"Mental mistakes doom Rays in loss to Cardinals"

 
Every day, there is always a new variety of stories linked to the phrase, "mental mistakes".  Either the writer recaps a game, calling out the mistakes or a coach or player claims that mistakes were made. It has become sort of a throwaway phrase, "...we made a lot of mental mistakes out there today, that we need to avoid if we want to get to the playoffs..." The million dollar question then is HOW to reduce these mental mistakes. And, to answer that, we need to define WHAT is a mental mistake?

In a previous post, I introduced the "Sports Cognition Framework", which is a trio of elements needed for success in sports. These three elements are:

- decision-making ability (knowing what to do)

- motor skill competence (being physically able to do it)

- positive mental state (being motivated and confident to do it)

Most of the time, a mental mistake is thought of as a breakdown of decision-making ability. The center fielder throws to the wrong base, the tight end runs the wrong route, or the defender forgets to mark his man, etc. These scenarios describe poor decisions or even memory lapses during the stress of the game. They are not necessarily the lack of skill to execute a play or the lack of confidence or motivation to want to do the right thing. It is a recognition, in hindsight, that the best option was not chosen. In addition to glaring negative plays, there are also missed opportunities on the field (i.e. taking a contested shot on goal, instead of passing to the open teammate).

So, back to the payoff question: HOW do we reduce mental mistakes and poor decisions? Just as we practice physical skills to improve our ability to throw, catch, shoot, run, etc., we need to practice making decisions using a a training system that directly exposes the athlete to these scenarios. Dr. Joan Vickers, who we met during our discussion of the Quiet Eye, has created a new system which she calls the "Decision-Training Model", and is the focus of the second half of her book, "Perception, Cognition, and Decision Training". As opposed to traditional training methods that separate skill training from tactical decision making training, the Decision-Training model (D-T) forces the athlete to couple her skill learning with the appropriate tactical awareness of when to use it.

So, instead of an "easy-first" breakdown of a skill, and then build it up step by step, D-T begins with a "hard-first" approach putting the "technique within tactics" demanding a higher cognitive effort right up front. The theory behind D-T is that the coach is not on the field with the player during competition, so the player must learn to rely on their own blended combination of skill and game awareness. Research from Vickers and others shows that D-T provides a more lasting retention of knowledge, while more traditional bottom-up training with heavy coach feedback delivers a stronger short-term performance gain, but that success in practice does not often translate later in games. Practice and training need to mirror game situations as often and as completely as the real thing.

There are three major steps to Decision-Training (p. 167):

1. Identify a decision the athlete has to make in a game, using one of the seven cognitive skills (anticipation, attention, focus/concentration, pattern recognition, memory, problem solving and decision making)

2. Create a drill(s) that trains that decision using one of the seven cognitive triggers (object cues, location cues, Quiet Eye, reaction-time cues, memory cues, kinesthetic cues, self-coaching cues)

3. Use one or more of the seven decision tools in the design of the drill (variable practice, random practice, bandwidth feedback, questioning, video feedback, hard-first instruction, external focus of instruction)

This post was just to serve as an introduction to D-T. Dr. Vickers and her team at University of Calgary offer full courses for coaches to learn D-T and apply it in their sport. Combined with the visual cues of the playing environment provided by the Quiet Eye gaze control, D-T seems to offer a better tactical training option for coaches and athletes. Coming up, we will continue the discussion of decision-making in sports with a look at some other current research. Please give me your thoughts on D-T and the whole topic of mental mistakes!

Baseball and the Brain - Fielding

With the crack of the bat, the ball sails deep into the outfield. The left-fielder starts his run back and to the right, keeping his eyes on the ball through its flight path. His pace quickens initially, then slows down as the ball approaches. He arrives just in time to make the catch. What just happened? How did this fielder know where to run and at what speed so that he and the ball intersected at the same exact spot on the field. Why didn't he sprint to the landing spot and then wait for the ball to drop, instead of his controlled speed to arrive just when the ball did? What visual cues did he use to track the ball's flight (just the ball? the ball's movement against its background? other fielder's reaction to the ball?)

Just like we learned in pitching and hitting, fielding requires extensive mental abilities involving eyes, brain, and body movements to accomplish the task. Some physical skills, such as speed, do play a part in catching, but its the calculations and estimating that our brain has to compute that we often take for granted. The fact that fielders are not perfect in this skill, (there are dropped fly balls, or bad judgments of ball flight), begs the question of how to improve? As we saw with pitching and hitting (and most sports skills), practice does improve performance. But, if we understand what our brains are trying to accomplish, we can hopefully design more productive training routines to use in practice.

(Mike Stadler, associate professor of psychology at University of Missouri, provides a great overview of current research in his book, "The Psychology of Baseball". I highly recommend it for the complete look at this topic. I'll summarize the major points here.)

One organization that does not take this skill for granted is NASA. The interception of a ballistic object in mid-flight can describe a left fielder's job or an anti-missile defense system or how a pilot maneuvers a spacecraft through a three dimensional space. In fact, a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Ames Research Center, Michael McBeath , has been studying fly ball catching since 1995. His team has developed a rocket-science like theory named Linear Optical Trajectory to describe the process that a fielder uses to follow the path of a batted ball. LOT says the fielder will adjust his movement towards the ball so that its trajectory follows a straight line through his field of vision. Rather than compute the landing point of the ball, racing to that spot and waiting, the fielder uses the information provided by the path of the ball to constantly adjust his path so that they intersect at the right time and place. The LOT theory is an evolution from an earlier theory called Optical Acceleration Cancellation (OAC) that had the same idea but only explained the fielder's tracking behavior in the vertical dimension. In other words, as the ball leaves the bat the fielder watches the ball rise in his field of vision. If he were to stand still and the ball was hit hard enough to land behind him, his eyes would track the ball up and over his head, or at a 90 degree angle. If the ball landed in front of him, he would see the ball rise and fall but his viewing angle may not rise above 45 degrees. LOT and OAC argue that the fielder repositions himself throughout the flight of the ball to keep this viewing angle between 0 and 90 degrees. If its rising too fast, he needs to turn and run backwards. If the viewing angle is low, then the fielder needs to move forward so that the ball doesn't land in front of him. He can't always make to the landing spot in time, but keeping the ball at about a 45 degree angle by moving will help ensure that he gets there in time. While OAC explained balls hit directly at a fielder, LOT helps add the side-to-side dimension, as in our example of above of a ball hit to the right of the fielder.

The OAC and LOT theories do agree on a fundamental cognitive science debate. There are two theories of how we perceive the world and then react to it. First, the Information Processing (IP) theory likens our brain to a computer in that we have inputs, our senses that gather information about the world, a memory system that stores all of our past experiences and lessons learned, and a "CPU" or main processor that combines our input with our memory and computes the best answer for the given problem. So,IP would say that the fielder sees the fly ball and offers it to the brain as input, the brain then pulls from memory all of the hundreds or thousands of fly ball flight paths that have been experienced, and then computes the best path to the ball's landing point based on what it has "learned" through practice. McBeath's research and observations of fielders has shown that the processing time to accomplish this task would be too great for the player to react. OAC and LOT subscribe to the alternate theory of human perception, Ecological Psychology (EP). EP eliminates the call to memory from the processing and argues that the fielder observes the flight path of the ball and can react using the angle monitoring system. This is still up for debate as the IPers would argue "learned facts" like what pitch was thrown, how a certain batter hits those pitches, how the prevailing wind will affect the ball, etc. And, with EP, how can the skill differences between a young ballplayer and an experienced major leaguer be accounted for? What is the point of practice, if the trials and errors are not stored/accessed in memory?

Of course, we haven't mentioned ground balls and their behavior, due to the lack of research out there. The reaction time for a third baseman to snare a hot one-hopper down the line is much shorter. This would also argue in favor of EP, but what other systems are involved?

Game Highlights
Again, I have just touched on this subject, see Prof. Stadler's book for a much better discussion. Arguing about which theory explains a fielder's actions is only productive if we can apply the research to create better drills and practices for our players. My own layman's view is that the LOT theory is getting there as an explanation, but I'm still undecided about EP vs. IP . So many sport skills rely on some of these foundations, hence my "search for the truth" continues! As with pitching and hitting, fielding seems to improve with practice. As we move forward, we'll look at the theories behind practice and what structure they should take.

The Sports Cognition Framework

So, why should athletes and coaches be interested in all of this cognitive science stuff? They have been playing and coaching these sports for years, practicing with the same drills and routines and having success. Some may say, "if it ain't broke..." At the same time, all players and coaches are looking for the "the Edge"; the practice technique, game strategy, player development skill that will help the bottom line; winning. The physical training attributes still need to be developed in terms of raw speed, acceleration, agility, strength and balance. Hours are spent in the training rooms and gyms improving these variables. The game preparation process is still there; watching film, breaking down strengths and weaknesses of the opponent, tactical planning, etc. Some may say that is the "mental preparation" needed for competition. That's true, it is a plan for success, but the key is in execution of the plan. At the exact moment in the game when execution is needed, will each player know the right thing to do and be able to do it? That is the essence of what I call the "Sports Cognition Framework". It is the combination of the three themes: decision-making competence (knowing what to do), motor skill competence (being physically able to do it), and positive mental state (being motivated and confident to do it). There seem to be many, deep areas of research into each of these topics. My job is to dig into each of these areas and look for relevant research that you will find practical to include in your training or your coaching.