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Ironic processes of concentration and suppression under pressure: A study on rifle shooting in Norwegian elite
Khelifa Bartura1, Frank Eirik Abrahamsen1,2, Henrik Gustafsson1,3
1Department of Sport and Social Sciences, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, NIH, Oslo, Norway.
Abstract:
In rifle shooting, suppressing unwanted thoughts can backfire in one's performance, causing athletes to behave contrary to their desired intention and further deteriorate their performance.
Purpose:
This study examined how priming attentional and negative cues affected participants' shooting performances toward ironic error targets under cognitive load conditions in Stroop task across two experiments.
Methods:
Semi-elite biathletes (Experiment 1, n = 10; Experiment 2, n = 9) participated in the study. The study used a within-subject quasi-experimental design, particularly a one-way repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance and a 2 × 2 fully repeated measures analysis of variance, to determine the participants' hit rates and shooting response times (RTs). In both experiments, the participants completed the reverse-Stroop-based target shooting performance under low- and high-cognitive load conditions while receiving frequent priming attentional and negative cues.
Results:
The findings from Experiment 1 suggest that regulating repetitive priming attentional thoughts is efficacious in mitigating the likelihood of ironic performance errors and interference effects. The results of Experiment 2 show that repetitive priming negative cues resulted in negligible ironic error hit rates and slower RTs in target hits under high-cognitive load conditions. The Bayesian analyses provided evidence supporting the null hypotheses.
Conclusion:
Trying to control repetitive priming attentional and negative thoughts reduces ironic performance errors to a similar degree under cognitive load conditions among biathletes, regardless of interference effects. Further research is needed to determine the effectiveness of suppressing task-relevant negative instructions in reducing the likelihood of ironic performance errors under pressure.
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