The effects of strategic self-talk with consideration of attentional focus on discrete motor task performance

The self-talk matching hypothesis predicts that instructional self-talk is more effective for tasks involving precision and accuracy, and that motivational self-talk is more effective for tasks involving endurance, strength, and power (Theodorakis et al., 2000). Around 60 % of self-talk interventions support these differential effects predictions (Hardy et al., 2018). Attentional focus research may strengthen the matching hypothesis, where an external focus has been shown to improve performance and facilitate learning for a variety of motor tasks (Chua et al., 2021). It has been postulated that instructional self-talk impacts performance though attentional mechanisms (Galanis & Hatzigeorgiadis, 2020). Infusing internal and external attentional focus into instructional self-talk may allow more consistent performance differences to emerge between instructional and motivational self-talk. The purpose of the present study was to compare instructional self-talk with internal and external foci to motivational self-talk. 36 participants (Male = 10, Female = 26; M = 20.65 years) completed 60 dart throws in a counter-balanced order, with 15 occurring under each of four conditions: control (CON), internal-instructional self-talk (IIST), external-instructional self-talk (EIST), and motivational self-talk (MST). Performance was measured through mean radial error (MRE) for accuracy and bivariate variable error (BVE) for consistency. For a within-subjects design, data were analyzed with separate one-way repeated measures ANOVAs with four levels (i.e., CON, IIST, EIST, and MST) for each dependent variable. EIST and MST had significantly less MRE than IIST (p < .05). Results suggest that incorporating external focus into instructional self-talk may benefit discrete motor task performance.