The social and cognitive neuroscience of performance under pressure

Sportsmen and sportswomen tend to raise their game from the training ground to the big match. Nevertheless, spectators tend to remember the relatively few occasions when it all goes wrong and athletes perform badly under the pressure of competition. Despite such memorable incidents of performers choking under pressure, relatively little is known about the causes of such dramatic drops in performance and, importantly, whether choking can be prevented by the appropriate training methods.
Our previous research has improved our understanding of how people perform under pressure and how they can be trained to remain robust under pressure. We have developed a brain training protocol that uses state-of-the-art brain-computer-interface technology for teaching novice golfers to learn how to putt like pros, both under pressure-free practice and pressure-laden competition conditions.
The aim of the proposed project is to discover whether our brain training protocol can be successful in teaching relative novices to produce patterns of brain activity associated with the best performances of experts and thereby ensure that their performance is as optimal as possible and robust under pressure. If our research proves successful in protecting people from the perils of psychological pressure, it could be used to help sports stars flourish.