“My research team and I have found that highly skilled golfers are more likely to hole a simple 3-foot putt when we give them the tools to stop analyzing their shot, to stop thinking,” Beilock said. “Highly practiced putts run better when you don’t try to control every aspect of performance.” Even a simple trick of singing helps prevent portions of the brain that might interfere with performance from taking over, Beilock’s research shows.
In one study, researchers gave standardized tests to black and white students, both before and after President Obama was elected. Black test takers performed worse than white test takers before the election. Immediately after Obama’s election, however, blacks’ performance improved so much that their scores were nearly equal with whites. When black students can overcome the worries brought on by stereotypes, because they see someone like President Obama who directly counters myths about racial variation in intelligence, their performance improves.
Beilock and her colleagues also have shown that when first-grade girls believe that boys are better than girls at math, they perform more poorly on math tests. One big source of this belief? The girls’ female teachers. It turns out that elementary school teachers are often highly anxious about their own math abilities, and this anxiety is modeled from teacher to student. When the teachers serve as positive role models in math, their male and female students perform equally well.
In tests in her lab, Beilock and her research team gave people with no meditation experience 10 minutes of meditation training before they took a high-stakes test. Students with meditation preparation scored 87, or B+, versus the 82 or B- score of those without meditation training. This difference in performance occurred despite the fact that all students were of equal ability.
Interestingly, they claim that choking is due to poor use of working memory:
Talented people often have the most working memory, but when worries creep up, the working memory they normally use to succeed becomes overburdened. People lose the brain power necessary to excel.
That is an interesting idea. But there are motor programs that don’t use verbal working memory. Making conscious adjustments (different from how the program was practiced) could interfere, though.
I think physiological panic/fear has to be a large part of most choke experiences, distinct from any thoughts interfering w/ working memory.
I’ve also heard of people choking especially because they’re worried that their social status may be threatened if they’re too good or too bad at something. I don’t know if that acts through a different mechanism; I’m just saying that such concerns seem especially distorting on performance.
I’d like to see someone compare college students’ performance on important tests after, say, 0--3 drinks. If test anxiety hurts people’s scores as much as it seems to, then perhaps cheap beer will be used as a nootropic.
(A quick check on Google Scholar doesn’t show any studies that have been done on this, which isn’t surprising.)
It might be worth checking, though it would surprise me if it works. I’m betting that if alcohol improves test performance, college students would have discovered it long ago.
Thanks for the link—I didn’t realize test anxiety was that common or that there were such effective methods of treating it.
Review of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have To
Interestingly, they claim that choking is due to poor use of working memory:
That is an interesting idea. But there are motor programs that don’t use verbal working memory. Making conscious adjustments (different from how the program was practiced) could interfere, though.
I think physiological panic/fear has to be a large part of most choke experiences, distinct from any thoughts interfering w/ working memory.
I’ve also heard of people choking especially because they’re worried that their social status may be threatened if they’re too good or too bad at something. I don’t know if that acts through a different mechanism; I’m just saying that such concerns seem especially distorting on performance.
I’d like to see someone compare college students’ performance on important tests after, say, 0--3 drinks. If test anxiety hurts people’s scores as much as it seems to, then perhaps cheap beer will be used as a nootropic.
(A quick check on Google Scholar doesn’t show any studies that have been done on this, which isn’t surprising.)
It might be worth checking, though it would surprise me if it works. I’m betting that if alcohol improves test performance, college students would have discovered it long ago.
Thanks for the link—I didn’t realize test anxiety was that common or that there were such effective methods of treating it.