Sport and exercise

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In the minds eyeAIDAN MORAN discusses mental imagery in sport:

seeing, feeling and believing.

MANY people believe thatalthough sport is played with thebody, it is won in the mind. Notsurprisingly, sport performers increasinglyturn to psychology in an effort to gain awinning edge over their rivals. In thisregard, mental imagery, or the ability torepresent in the mind information that isnot currently being perceived, is widelyused by athletes in an effort to enhancetheir performance in competition. Forexample, the golfer Tiger Woodsacknowledged the importance of seeingand feeling desired shots in his mindseye before addressing the ball:

You have to see the shots and feel themthrough your hands. (quoted in Pitt,1998, p.5)

Complementing such anecdotal insights aresurvey data showing that mental rehearsaltechniques are both highly valued andpractised routinely by top US Olympicathletes (Gould et al., 1998; Ungerleider &Golding, 1991). But what do we really knowabout the nature and use of imagery inathletes? What are the new directions in thisfield, and can the study of athletes imageryshed new light on how the mind works?

Nature and use of imagery Mental imagery plays a vital role in ourexistence. We use it to give directions toothers, to try to remember where weparked our car, or to rehearse covertly what we wish to do or say in some futuresituation (e.g. at an interview). Diarystudies (e.g. Kosslyn et al., 1990) show thatabout two thirds of our mental images arevisual in nature which may explain thedearth of research on auditory imagery (i.e.the ability to hear an ambulance siren atwill), or on its kinaesthetic counterpart (e.g.the ability tofeel the muscular sensationselicited by running up a steep flight ofstairs; Moran & Mac Intyre, 1998).Regardless of the sensory modalityinvolved, imagery in athletes has beenstudied through a combination of in-depthinterviews and psychometric tests (Hall,1998). From such research three mainfindings have emerged concerning imageryuse in sport (see review by Hall, 2001;Munroe et al., 2000).

To begin with, athletes tend to employ

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imagery more in pre-competitive situations(e.g. in the dressing room, on the startingblocks) than in training a fact thatsuggests that they tend to visualise morefor the purpose of performanceenhancement than for skill mastery.Second, research indicates that athletesvisualise for both motivational andcognitive purposes. The former category is rather ill defined but includes theimagination of specific goals and loweredarousal levels. For example, RichardFaulds, Britains 2000 Olympic goldmedallist in trap-shooting, used imagery to reduce performance anxiety:

The image is the ice-man. You walk likean ice-man and think like an ice-man.(quoted in Nichols, 2000, p.7)

Cognitively, athletes use imagery for two main purposes skill-learning andconcentration improvement. In the first case,mental rehearsal involves a sequence ofrelaxing physically, closing ones eyes, andtrying to see and feel oneself repeatedlyperforming a specific skill (e.g. a tennisserve) successfully in ones imagination.This use of imagery, called mental practice(MP), is facilitated by a specially designedscript that describes the skill to be learnedin vivid, multisensory detail.

Interestingly, reviews of controlledexperimental studies using MP show that it has a small but reliable effect on skill-learning (see Driskell et al., 1994).Specifically, people assigned to a mentalpractice condition when learning a simplemotor skill tend to improve significantlymore than those who are assigned to a control condition but not as much asthose who have physically practised theskill in question. This finding is somewhatparadoxical, as it shows that people canlearn skills even when no sensory feedbackis available.

In general, research reveals that MP ismore effective for expert performers thanfor novices and that it is especially suitablefor cognitive tasks (e.g. maze learning) thatrequire sequential planning (see alsoCooper et al., 2001). Unfortunately, littleresearch has been conducted on the MP ofsport skills by athletes in field settings.

Another cognitive application ofimagery is as a concentration technique(Moran, 1996). In this case, athletesprepare for an event by visualisingintended actions while practising insimulated competitive conditions. Toillustrate, consider how Mike Atherton, theformer England cricket captain, preparedmentally for a test match with Australia:

What I find really good for me is tospend a few solitary moments out on the pitch either the day before or on themorning of the match, which is when Ido the visualisation stuff whats goingto come, whos going to bowl, how theyare going to bowlso that nothing cancome as a surprisethe visualisation isvital. (quoted in Selvey, 1998, p.2).

Clearly, a key function of imagery here isto automate ones responses to differentpossible competitive scenarios.

A third question probed by researchersin this field concerns the content ofathletes imagery. Unfortunately, attempts

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Sport and exercise

to answer this question have been hamperedby an age-old problem namely, that it isvery difficult to validate objectively thealleged content of peoples imagery. Usingqualitative methodology, however, studiesshow that the imagery of expert athletes isusually described as vivid, positive incontent (except when anxiety encouragesironic imagery as happens when golferssay to themselves I hope I dont hit thatlarge bunker!) and mainly visual in nature(apart from sports such as gymnasticswhere kinaesthetic imagery is required). A practical implication of such findings isthat performers in target sports (e.g. golf)should be trained to visualise what they wishto achieve not what they want to avoid.

New directionsMost studies in the field of imageryresearch are rather atheoretical in nature.Accordingly, the putative mechanismsunderlying imagery effects in the learningand performance of athletic skills areunclear. So, future research should attemptto develop and test theoretical models ofthe imagery requirements of such skills.

Despite its apparent importance toathletes, kinaesthetic or feeling orientedimagery has attracted less researchattention from psychologists than hasvisual imagery. This oversight could berectified by investigating the way in whichexpert sport performers cope with theforce and movement demands of theirchosen activity.

Another area with virtually noknowledge base is athletes meta-imageryprocesses their beliefs about the natureand regulation of their own imagery skills.Clearly, it would be interesting to find outif top athletes have greater insight into, orcontrol over, their imagery processes whencompared with novices.

Finally, we need to tackle the task ofvalidating athletes reports of their imageryexperiences. The problem here is that wemay be approaching this task with thewrong theory. What if imagery were not so much something that people have butsomething that they do? If, as currentcognitive research suggests, imagery andperception are functionally equivalent, theninterference should occur when athletes arerequired to use these processes concurrentlyin the same modality. For example, athleteswho claim to be using kinaesthetic imageryprocesses should display increased errorrates and response latencies when requiredto perform a concurrent kinaestheticperception task (e.g. estimating force ormovement demands on their muscles)

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relative to athletes performing a secondarytask in another sensory modality. Therefore,judicious use of dual-task methodologymay help us to find out whether or notathletes are really using imagery whenpurporting to engage in mental practice.

Implications for understandingthe mindAlthough cognitive psychology isostensibly concerned with understandinghow the mind works in acquiring and usingknowledge, it has devoted little or noattention to the world of athleticperformance (although Frederick Bartlettused tennis and cricket examples whenexplaining his theory of schemata in theearly 1930s). Indeed, the word sport isconspicuously absent from the subjectindexes of most textbooks of cognitivepsychology. Nevertheless, imagery researchin sport may help to enrich cognitive theoryin several ways.

First, as explained above, sport provides a natural laboratory for the studyof neglected topics such as kinaesthetic andmeta-imagery processes. Second, it offers a sample of expert participants (top-classathletes) and a range of imagery tests (Hall,1998) that may help researchers to makeprogress in understanding individualdifferences in cognitive processes.Interestingly, Kosslyn et al. (2001) pointout that the question why people differ somuch in imagery abilities remains largelyunresolved. Finally, research on athletescould facilitate our understanding of theneural substrates of imagery. Recent

studies (Behrmann, 2000; Kosslyn et al.,2001) show that people with vivid imageryshow significantly increased blood flow inthe occipital region when visualising. Doesthis pattern also emerge when functionalbrain-mapping techniques are applied toathletes skilled in the use of imagery?More adventurously, what areas of thebrain light up when kinaesthetic imageryprocesses are elicited?

These are just some of the cognitiveissues raised by research on imageryprocesses in athletes. But this field hasimplications that go beyond empiricalpsychology. For example, it highlights thejoy of playing in ones head at any age a practice evoked so magically by SeamusHeaney in his poem Markings:

We marked the pitch; four jackets for four goalposts, that was all

And then we picked the teams and crossed the line our called names drew between us.