using self-report instruments (Boutcher, 2002). Second, the TAIS assesses perceived,
rather than actual, attentional skills. Accordingly, we cannot be sure that athletes who
complete it are differentiating between what they actually do and what they would like us
to believe that they do in everyday situations requiring attentional processes. Third, the
TAIS fails to differentiate between athletes of
different skill levels in sports in which selective attention is known to be important
(Summers and Ford, 1990), Fourth, Nideffer’s theory is conceptually flawed because it
does not distinguish between task-relevant and task-irrelevant information in sport
situations. In view of these difficulties, Cratty (1983) concluded that the TAIS was only
“marginally useful, and the data it produces are not much better than the information a
coach might obtain from simply questioning athletes or observing their performance” (p.
100),
Critical thinking questions
From the evidence above, what conclusions would you draw about the validity of the
TAIS? If you were re-designing this test, what changes would you make to its content
and format? Can a psychological test be useful in applied settings even if its construct
validity is questionable? More generally, do you think that paper-and-pencil tests of
attention should be augmented by other measurement paradigms? If so, which ones
would you suggest and why?
As you can see, the psychometric paradigm, as epitomised by the TAIS, is a popular if
somewhat flawed approach to the measurement of attentional processes in athletes.
Nevertheless, this approach has yielded several promising new instruments which claim
to measure concentration skills. For example, Hatzigeorgiadis and Biddle (2000)
developed a seventeen-item test called the “Thought Occurrence Questionnaire for Sport”
(TOQS) which purports to assess the degree to which athletes experience distracting
thoughts (e.g., about previous mistakes that they have made) during competition.
Although this measure lacks validation data at present, it is a promising tool because of
its explicit theoretical origins.
Neuroscientific approachThe second measurement paradigm in this field involves the search for reliable
psychophysiological correlates and/or neural substrates of attentional processes in
athletes. Within this paradigm, three main waves of measurement development may be
identified.
To begin with, indices of attention such as heart rate (HR) have been monitored in
athletes as they perform self-paced skills in target sports like archery, pistol-shooting and
rifle-shooting (see review by Hatfield and Hillman, 2001). A reliable finding that has
emerged from this line of research is that cardiac deceleration (or a slowing of the heart
rate) tends to occur among elite rifle-shooters in the seconds before they pull the trigger
of their guns (see review by Boutcher, 2002). This finding is interesting in the light of
Garry Sobers’s comments at the beginning of this chapter because it suggests that expert
Staying focused in sport: concentration in sport performers 103