Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

motivational and cognitive purposes. Although the former category is rather “fuzzy” and
ill-defined, it includes applications like seeing oneself achieving specific goals and
feeling oneself being relaxed in competitive situations. Interestingly, it is precisely this
latter application that Richard Faulds pursued in creating the image of an “ice-man” prior
to winning the 2000 Olympic gold medal for trap-shooting (see early in chapter). With
regard to cognitive uses of imagery by athletes, two main applications have been
discovered by researchers. On the one hand, as is evident from anecdotal and survey
evidence, imagery is widely used as a tool for mental rehearsal (a “cognitive specific”
application). On the other hand, imagery is often used as a concentration technique. Thus
as we learned in Chapter 4, the former England cricket batsman Mike Atherton used to
practise in his “mind’s eye” in an effort to counteract anticipated distractions on the big
day. A third general research finding in this field concerns the content of athletes’
imagery. In this regard, Hall (2001) claims that athletes tend to use positive imagery (e.g.,
seeing themselves winning competitive events) and “seldom imagine themselves losing”
(p. 536). But is this really true? After all, everyday experience would suggest that many
club-level golfers are plagued by negative mental images such as hitting bunkers or
striking the ball out of bounds. Nevertheless, Hall (2001) concluded that athletes’
imagery is generally accurate, vivid and positive in content.

New directions for research on imagery in athletes

Two questions dominate this section of the chapter. First, what new directions can be
identified in research on imagery processes in athletes? Second, does this research shed
any light on how the mind works?
At least six new directions may be identified for imagery research on athletes (Moran,
2002a; Murphy and Martin, 2002). First, despite its obvious importance to many athletes
(e.g., see the quote from Tiger Woods at the beginning of the chapter), kinaesthetic or
feeling-oriented imagery has not been addressed adequately by researchers in this field.
Perhaps the main reason for this neglect is that there are no theoretical models of this
construct available in cognitive psychology. Second, very little is known about athletes’
“meta-imagery” processes—or their beliefs about the nature and regulation of their own
imagery skills (see Moran, 1996). Within this topic, it would be interesting to discover if
expert athletes have greater insight into, or control over, their imagery processes than do
relative novices. Third, additional research is required to establish the extent to which
athletes use mental imagery in the period immediately prior to competition (Beauchamp
et al., 2002). Fourth, we need to tackle the old issue of how to validate athletes’ reports of
their imagery experiences. As I mentioned early in this chapter, however, we may be
approaching this task with the wrong theory in mind. Put simply, what if imagery were
not so much a characteristic that people “have” but something—a cognitive process—that
they “do”? If, as Kosslyn et al. (2001) propose, imagery and perception are functionally
equivalent, then interference should occur when athletes are required to use these
processes concurrently in the same modality. As I indicated earlier, this possibility of
creating experimental analogues of this type of interference could help to discover
whether athletes are really using imagery when they claim to be mentally practising their
skills. Psychophysiological indices may also be helpful in “tracking” athletes’ imagery

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