of attention refers to at least three different cognitive processes: concentration or effortful
awareness, selectivity of perception, and/or the ability to co-ordinate two or more actions
at the same time. A fourth dimension of attention called “vigilance” has also been
postulated (De Weerd, 2002). This dimension designates a person’s ability to orient
attention and respond to randomly occurring relevant stimuli over an extended period of
time.
Unfortunately, occasionally the multidimensional nature of attention has spawned
conceptual confusion among sport psychologists. For example, Gauron (1984) appeared
to suggest that mental time-sharing is a weakness or pathology rather than a skill when he
claimed that athletes could “suffer from divided attention” (p. 43, italics mine). Perhaps
this author failed to grasp the fact that repeated practice enables people to spread their
attentional resources between concurrent activities—often without any deterioration in
performance. Incidentally, research shows that people are capable of doing two or more
things at the same time provided that at least one of them is highly practiced and the tasks
operate in different sensory modalities (Matlin, 2002). If neither task has been practised
sufficiently and/or if the concurrent activities in question take place in the same sensory
system, then errors will probably occur. In Box 5.3 in Chapter 5, we examine a practical
implication of this principle when we explain why it is dangerous to drive a car while
listening to a football match on the radio.
Since the 1950s, a number of metaphors have been coined by cognitive psychologists
to describe the selective and divided dimensions of attention. For example, according to
the “spotlight” metaphor (see review by Fernandez-Duque and Johnson, 1999), selective
attention resembles a mental beam which illuminates targets that are located either in the
external world around us or else in the subjective domain of our own thoughts and
feelings. This idea of specifying a target for one’s attentional spotlight is important
practically as well as theoretically because it is only recently that sport psychologists
have begun to explore the question of what exactly athletes should focus on when they
are exhorted to “concentrate” by their coaches (see Mallett and Hanrahan, 1997; Singer,
2000). Unfortunately, the spotlight metaphor of attention is plagued by two main
problems. First, it has not adequately explained the mechanisms by which executive
control of one’s attentional focus is achieved. Put simply, who or what is directing the
spotlight? This question is difficult to answer without postulating a homunculus. Second,
the spotlight metaphor neglects the issue of what lies outside the beam of our
concentration. Therefore, it ignores the possibility that unconscious factors can affect
people’s attentional processes. Interestingly, such factors have attracted increasing
scrutiny from cognitive scientists in recent years. Thus Nadel and Piattelli-Palmarini
(2002) remarked that although cognitive science began with the assumption that
cognition was limited to conscious processes, “much of the domain is now concerned
with phenomena that lie behind the vale of consciousness” (p. xxvi). We shall return to
this issue later in the chapter when we consider how unconscious sources of distraction
can affect athletes.
Metaphors have also been coined for divided attention. Thus the fact that people can
sometimes do two or more concurrent tasks equally well suggests that attention is a
“resource” or pool of mental energy (Kahneman, 1973). This pool is believed to be
available for allocation to competing tasks depending on various strategic principles. For
example, motivation, practice and arousal are held to increase spare attentional capacity
Staying focused in sport: concentration in sport performers 97