enhancement in applied sport psychology is really an exercise in meta-attentional training
whereby athletes learn to understand, and gain some control over, their apparently
capricious concentration system. As yet, however, we know very little about the nature,
accuracy and/or malleability of athletes’ theories of how their own mental processes
operate. Next, we need to address the question of why athletes lose their concentration so
easily in competitive situations. Unfortunately, until recently, few studies addressed this
topic. Therefore, little or nothing was known about the influence of internal
distractions—those which arise from athletes’ own thoughts and feelings—on
performance (but see review by Moran, 1996). However, with the advent of Wegner’s
(1994,2002) ironic processes model and the development of novel ways of assessing
athletes’ susceptibility to cognitive interference (e.g., see the test developed by
Hatzigeorgiadis and Biddle, 2000), a greater understanding has emerged of the
mechanisms underlying athletes’ internal distractions. Third, Simons (1999) raised the
old question of whether or not sport performers actually know precisely what they should
be concentrating on in different sport situations. This question is often neglected by sport
psychologists in their enthusiasm to provide practical assistance to athletes. As a solution,
Simons (1999) recommended that instead of exhorting players to “watch the ball”, sport
psychology consultants should ask such questions as “What way was the ball spinning as
it came to you?” or “Did you guess correctly where it would land”? Fourth, what is the
best way to measure concentration skills in athletes? Although three different approaches
to this question have been proposed in sport psychology (i.e., the psychometric,
neuroscientific and experimental; see earlier in chapter), there is a dearth of validation
data on tests of concentration in sport. This situation is disappointing because unless
concentration skills can be measured adequately, it is impossible to evaluate whether or
not they have been improved by the exercises and techniques discussed earlier. A related
problem is that few tests have been devised explicitly to assess concentration skills in
athletes. This situation is puzzling given the importance of this construct for successful
performance in sport. Fifth, additional research is required on the relationship between
the structure of various athletic activities and their attentional demands (see also Chapter
1 for a discussion of this issue). For example, do untimed games such as golf place
different cognitive demands on athletes’ concentration systems as compared with those
imposed by timed activities (e.g., soccer)? If so, what theoretical mechanisms could
account for such differences? A related issue concerns the type of concentration required
for success in various sports. Intuitively, it seems reasonable to expect that sports such as
weight-lifting may require short periods of intense concentration while others (e.g.,
cycling) may demand sustained alertness for a longer duration. If this idea is supported
by empirical research, is it reasonable to expect that the same concentration intervention
packages should work equally well in all sports? Unfortunately, at present, many applied
sport psychologists seem to endorse a “one-size-fits-all” approach in advocating the same
toolbox of psychological strategies (e.g., goal-setting, self-talk) for a variety of different
athletic problems. Finally, additional research is needed to establish the precise
mechanisms by which emotions (such as anxiety) affect athletes’ concentration
processes. One way to address this question is to explore the visual search behaviour of
anxious athletes as they tackle laboratory simulations of sport-relevant tasks (see Moran
et al., 2002).
Staying focused in sport: concentration in sport performers 121