an outstanding athletic performance? Give reasons for your answer. Finally, do you think
that athletes can be trained to experience flow states more regularly?
One of the critical thinking questions in Box 4.1 concerned the apparent rarity of peak
experiences in sport. One possible reason why flow states are not more common in sport
is that our concentration system is too fragile to maintain the type of absorption that is
necessary for them. To explain, psychologists believe that concentration is controlled
mainly by the “central executive” component of our working memory system (whose
main objective is to keep a small amount of information active in our minds while we
make a decision about whether or not to process it further: see Logie, 1999). This
component of the memory system regulates what we consciously attend to, such as
holding a telephone number in our heads before we write it down. Unfortunately, the
working memory system is very limited in its capacity and duration. This limitation helps
to explain why people are easily distracted. Put simply, we find it very difficult to focus
on our intentions when there is a lot of activity going on around us. Other causes of
distractibility will be examined briefly later in the chapter. In any case, as soon as we
begin to pay attention to task-irrelevant information—something other than the job at
hand—our mental energy is diverted and we lose our concentration temporarily. Despite
the issues raised in Box 4.1, there is little doubt that athletes who perform at their peak
tend to report focusing only on task-relevant information—which is a sign of effective
concentration.
The third source of evidence on the importance of concentration in sport comes from
experimental research on the consequences of manipulating athletes’ attentional focus in
competitive situations. For example, Mallett and Hanrahan (1997) found that sprinters
who had been trained to use race plans that involved deliberately focusing on task-
relevant cues ran faster than those in baseline (control) conditions. Similarly, the use of
“associative” concentration techniques in which athletes are trained to focus on bodily
signals such as heart beat, respiratory signals and kinaesthetic sensations has been linked
with faster performance in running (Masters and Ogles, 1998; Morgan, 2000) and
swimming (Couture, Jerome and Tihanyi, 1999) in comparison with “dissociative”
techniques such as paying attention to thoughts other than those concerned with bodily
processes.
To summarise, the preceding strands of evidence converge on the conclusion that
concentration is vital for success in sport. This conclusion has been echoed by researchers
such as Abernethy (2001) who observed that it is difficult to imagine any skill that could
be more important to athletic performance than “paying attention to the task at hand” (p.
53). But how can psychologists measure people’s attentional skills?
Measurement of attentional processes in athletesAs concentration is a hypothetical construct, and hence unobservable, it cannot be
measured directly. Nevertheless, attentional processes can be assessed indirectly using
methods drawn from three main paradigms: the psychometric (or individual differences),
experimental and neuroscientific traditions in psychology. Due to space restrictions, we
Staying focused in sport: concentration in sport performers 101