Deterioration in motor skill performance in expert skiers and athletes is common in situations where they experience high achievement motivation. One cause of this could be the orientation of the focus of attention towards oneself. The conscious concentration on how our movements and motor actions should be executed by processing explicit knowledge results in the interruption of automatic execution processes, which would lead to a decrease in our performance. Different investigations support the hypothesis that those athletes who possess limited explicit knowledge tend not to decline in executions under pressure compared to those who have more explicit knowledge of the task to be executed.
The reinvestment of motor control in situations under pressure
The reinvestment of motor process control is the tendency to consciously control our movements and actions by isolating and focusing on certain parts or technical elements of our motor task. It is the cause suggested to explain why our performance decreases in situations of execution under stress. In these conditions we try to consciously control the automatic execution of our movements (explicit process); when we should allow them to happen (implicit process) and pay attention to the context (course setting, terrain, traffic, snow conditions) to decide the tactics to apply.
It is assumed that, when we were beginners, we started by learning skiing in a general way about how to execute our movements to control our balance on skis and our speed. As we increased our sliding experiences, we learned specific solutions that we retrieved from our processing memory -for the moment limited- of previous executions, moving from incompetence to competence. When we gained enough motor experience to cope with environmental situations, at some point we stopped relying on our memory of the motor execution process and our performance became automatic. The automatic execution phase may be interrupted or cease to function if, now that we have become competent skiers, we ‘reinvest’ explicit knowledge during our automatic execution by paying excessive attention to it.
This situation, also called “deautomatization“, is characterized by focusing our attention on the specific execution of automatic movements. In other words, as a movement or action is practiced, our notion of how it is done decreases and this benefits automatism; but being aware of the control of the execution is detrimental because it becomes slow, that is, we pass from competence to incompetence. Sigmund Freud stated it clearly: “Many acts are performed successfully when they are not the object of a particular concentration of attention and errors can occur in those situations when one is too enthusiastic to be precise”.
So, the traditional method of teaching a motor skill, which emphasizes the explicit mode of execution, i.e., the ‘how’ to do it, is not necessarily the most effective in performance under pressure. We can use explicit knowledge by remembering the technical cues for executing turns: edge changing, weight shifting, pressure control, etc. While this overt process is required at the acquisition levels of motor skills, at expert levels during executions under pressure it is inefficient and leads to decreased performances.
An athlete may be predisposed to reinvert the orientation of his attention from the process of controlling technical execution in demanding situations. He interrupts the automatic execution, which does not require conscious control, affecting performance under pressure by generating technical errors when he has successfully executed the same technical action hundreds of times. This may occur because he has explicitly learned the movements and actions, i.e., the ‘step by step’ under verbal guidance; then, under stressful conditions, he begins to rely on that guidance and thus what he used to execute in a fluid and automatic way, he now does it mechanically in separate blocks of movements. Moreover, this excessive attention to his own movements diminishes vigilance over the tactical and strategic issues of the execution.
The person who has learned skiing under implicit learning conditions has nothing to reinvest since he does not have a detailed knowledge of his own execution and can still perform it correctly, therefore, in situations of pressure, his attention is not directed towards his movements and actions but towards the conditions of the terrain, the environment, or the course layout. He avoids wasting time and attentional energy reviewing his own technique since this reduces visual anticipation, motor anticipation, and decision making.
If we do not reinvest control of what we have learned, we will surely perform better when practicing after the ski lesson because we pay external attention (“I did better when practicing alone”); while if we do reinvest, we may perform better during class (“I do better when I listen, watch, or follow the instructor”).
