THE SKILL-PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIP STUDY PART 2

                                          

Continuing on from yesterday, these notes come from a 30-page long study titled "A Theory on the Skill-Performance Relationship" and looks at how skill and performance are entwined in various parts of life, but I'll keep it sports-related.

There's plenty of notes here that should be able to influence some changes in your coaching approach for the absolute better!

• Embodied cognition shows that memory of long/complex movement series in ballet can be enhanced by "marking" in practice, which is mentally rehearsing them rather then physically doing them, and that last part decreases cognitive load
• Recreation players often try shots that are outside of their ability and thus have very low success rates and are psychologically/ego-driven for social reasons
• Deficiencies in psychological skills leads to anxiety in critical situations which reduces motor coordination and increases rigidity of movements (freezing degrees of freedom), decreasing performance
• As skill improves, additional degrees of freedom are unfrozen, making your action more fluid and then you get more skillful again by then being able to regulate your degrees of freedom along with anxiety and other psychological disruptors/enhances
• Many people experience anxiety in tests and perform lower then they’re actually capable of from a knowledge point of view
• With expertise, skill execution becomes automatic from nonconscious processing but if experts are forced to consciously focus on skill execution, their performance decreases markedly, even to the level of novices
• When conscious thoughts are primed then these cognition's interfere with your well-rehearsed patterns of skilled movements turning fluid into slow, decreasing confidence and thus performance (choking/yips)
• Behavioral execution of skill does not occur in a psychological or social vacuum and is heavily influenced by internal/external factors
• Behavioral execution is also neurologically based where the loss of aversion correlates with performance decline/choking and the deactivation of the ventral striatum at high levels of incentives in skilled tasks
• The deactivation of the ventral striatum appears to mediate the relationship between incentives and performance such that those with more stable neural activity, achieved by not focusing on possible failures, perform better in high-skilled tasks
• Neural preparation for action starts well before intention to act and the action itself is the identification of neural representations of motor plans/encoding movement sequences
• The brain can activate various neural structures associated with action while blocking execution of that action
• Conscious cancelling is possible if it happens 200ms before the movement onset but its unclear how the brain does this
• Performance variance of a group of neurons prior to onset of a motor movement is linked to behavioral variance
• 50% of variance in behavioral performance is neural performance prior to an initiation of the movement suggesting nonconscious opportunities start well before an actual execution of skill and that the more you practice, the more it’s relegated to nonconscious processing resulting in greater efficiency in neural performance and fewer demands for cognitive control
• As performance improves it becomes more automatic and requires less cognitive control
• Continuous practice/application of skill changes the brain structure around that specific movement, and thereby behavioral performance
• Extended practice promotes neural efficiency which then takes less synaptic activity to produce internally generated sequences of movements
• Skill learning strengthens cortical representation of motor movements such as practicing golf swings increasing grey matter density which strengthens neural pathways relevant to the skill bring trained
• Overall performance does not consist of a monolithic performance but a series of separate performances, of un/successful performances
• Initial success forms the basis for momentum that has its roots in self confidence, perceived competence and internal attributions brought about by initial success, leading to a greater perceived likelihood of success and as momentum gains an upward spiral, its power to facilitate continued success increases and becomes more nonconscious in the process, especially in experts with automatic skill
• As sensorimotor skills improve they become increasingly proceduralised/less conscious thus not relying on explicit attention control
• Skillful performers have longer episodes of momentum and they bounce back faster when it breaks down
• When initial success is of high intensity like a big dunk then it gives a rise to high intensity momentum which is conducive to more frequent/more lasting episodes momentum
• In fast-paced sports performers, perceptions go back and forth/fast and continuous, with 1 feeding another so that a sense of momentum reinforces/strengthens perceptions of competence/confidence and likelihood of success, and vice versa - all leading to an upward spiral for more success
• Perceptions are almost completely nonsconscious so that a sense of momentum is experienced without conscious awareness where confidence/skillfulness is only recognised when momentum is lost and attention to conscious efforts to get it back, often leading to a negative momentum and a spiral of deteriorating performance
• When action is not fast-paced it gives more time for conscious thoughts that can interfere with the skill-momentum performance loop
• If individuals/teams have a lasting streak of success going on between different performance days, it may protect them from temporary losses and make negative momentums shorter within 1 performance day
• High skill does not automatically lead to momentum as performers may not be able to utilise their skill to build momentum and also because of the involvement of teammates/opposition