Choking Under Pressure May Come From Neural Signals

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pole vaulter choking under pressure

Every professional who performs at a high level understands the importance of remaining relaxed throughout stressful tasks. Choking under pressure, or failing to perform to one’s fullest potential when it counts the most, can happen to anyone.

Although athletes are frequently connected with this phenomenon, people choke under pressure in a variety of situations, including test-taking, presentations, puzzle-solving, and more. An excessively large potential “jackpot” payoff causes a deficit in motor preparation, according to recent research1 from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, revealing a first-of-its-kind neural explanation for choking under pressure

By looking at the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex, we found a signature of choking under pressure, that at the precision of 100s of milliseconds, was indicative of whether or not a subject would fail in an upcoming trial,

said first author Adam Smoulder, Carnegie Mellon graduate student.

Motor Control Neuron Spikes

To study how motor performance is impacted by choking under pressure, researchers recorded the spiking activity of hundreds of motor control neurons in Rhesus monkeys, who were trained to perform a challenging task to earn rewards of varying sizes. When an unusually large jackpot reward was at stake, the animals underperformed, leading the group to examine how cued rewards modulated neural population activity during movement preparation.

“Through a series of three hypotheses, we sought a more mechanistic explanation of choking under pressure. We found that rewards interact with target preparation signals to drive neural activity toward a region associated with improved reach execution, and then, at the highest rewards, spread away from this region,”

said Smoulder.

So it appears that raising motivation by delivering higher rewards can improve the discriminability of brain signals, but only to a certain extent. Beyond that limit, the researchers found a collapse in brain information, which is highly connected with when the animals choke under pressure.

Excessive Self-monitoring

This nuts-and-bolts level of explanation differs from previous, more holistic work, due to its high-resolution nature, and ability to consider the activity of populations of neurons, versus either the aggregate activity which can be seen with fMRI, or prior work in which only the activity of individual neurons was available.

“It’s hard work to take something that everybody has an intuition about and relate it to neural activity. Our data indicates that subjects seemed to become overcautious, self-monitoring to their detriment when the jackpots were offered. If people trying to avoid choking under pressure were to benefit from our study, we suggest they could beat it by finding the right balance between self-awareness and self-control, and just generally keeping it loose when the stakes go up, even if there is a natural tendency to clamp down,”

explained Aaron Batista, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh.

In terms of practical application, the group believes that understanding what’s going on in your brain can assist people in coping with and reducing the risks of choking under pressure.

“Choking under pressure is a really interesting example of when the brain gets it wrong. Now that we understand a little bit about how the brain is failing under these high reward situations, we want to try and correct it. One way to do this would be to design techniques that leverage our combined brain-computer interface (BCI) experience to encourage the brain not to do those things and ultimately, rescue the behavior,

said Steve Chase, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Neuroscience Institute.

  1. Smoulder, Adam L., et al. A neural basis of choking under pressure. Neuron (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.08.012