New technology and innovative research have combined to provide us with more and better information on what is required to optimize our efforts, whether in business, athletics, consumer purchases or our personal lives.
The approaching end of seasons in basketball, soccer and ice hockey focus attention on one sort of performance. But the lessons are useful for other aspects of our lives, as well.
What the most recent research has uncovered is that perceptions play a significant role both in how we perform - and how we judge our ability to perform both before and after the fact. The implication is that neurological pathways in the brain are far more intertwined than we might have imagined so that our ability to influence perceptions may be more powerful in actually stimulating performance than we might have believed possible. JL
Gretchen Reynolds reports in the New York Times:
Like many of us during March Madness, Jessica Witt is a college basketball fan. She is also a professor of psychology at Purdue University. Those interests converged recently at a Purdue basketball game, as she watched fans noisily try to distract the opposing players during free throws. The fans hooted, stomped and waved streamers — but it didn’t seem to have any effect on the outcome.
Dr. Witt wondered whether other interventions might. As director of the Action-Modulated Perception Lab at Purdue, she’d previously demonstrated that for successful tennis players and field-goal kickers, the ball or goal looks larger than it does to players not enjoying a hot streak. Success, for these athletes, had changed how they perceived the field of action. But, Dr. Witt wondered, could you turn that situation around and induce a performance-enhancing effect?
Could you, by making the ball or goal seem larger, make people perform better? Or, by making it look smaller, would you cause people to do worse?
To test the question, she turned to golf. Basketball hoops are difficult to manipulate. They’re up too high.
So she set up a putting green, with a standard-size golf hole at the top of a slight incline. In the ceiling, she mounted a projector that beamed a series of dark circles around the hole, surrounding it like beads on a necklace. In one image, these projected circles were smaller than the actual hole. In the other, they were larger.
Dr. Witt then had 36 volunteers view the hole from a few feet away, with and without the encircling projections, and “draw” on a computer screen their perception of the hole’s size using a digital drawing program.
Most of them perceived the hole to be larger than it actually was if smaller circles surrounded it, and smaller than life if it had bigger circles all around it.
When the volunteers subsequently putted, they landed more attempts when the hole was surrounded by little circles and seemed oversize to them. They missed more often when putting to the hole that, girded by larger circles, appeared shrunken.
Throughout, the actual size of the hole never changed.
“This finding was in some ways quite unexpected,” Dr. Witt says. It might seem obvious that a bigger-seeming target would invite success. But the reverse easily could be true, she says. A wider-seeming target could prompt wider shots. Reality would have betrayed you in that case, and you’d miss.
Or your perceptions might have no effect on performance. In an interesting study from 2004, when treadmill runners were told that they were striding at an easier pace than, in fact, they were, their bodies shrugged off the lie. The runners reported feeling exactly as tired as they would have felt running at their true pace, not at the pace they thought they were maintaining. Their lungs and legs weren’t fooled, even if the mind was.
“There’s been a theory” among many exercise psychologists “that the neural pathways for perception and action are separate,” Dr. Witt says, as the running experiment might suggest.
But Dr. Witt’s new experiment, published online this month in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that these pathways may intertwine and overlap, at least in tasks that require rigorous physical technique, like golf. In that case, how you perceive the playing field — even if your perception is inaccurate — will influence how you perform. Manipulate equipment or expectations so that a task looks easy and, her work suggests, it will be.
Just why, physiologically or psychologically, such manipulations succeed isn’t clear, although Dr. Witt has a theory. “We suspect that a bigger target makes people feel more confident in their ability” to hit it, she says. And greater confidence typically results in better performance. She and her colleagues did not assess confidence levels in this experiment, she says, though they plan to do so in follow-up work.
In the meantime, practical barriers remain before any of us can use her enticing finding that deception might make champions. You can’t, for instance, simply lie to yourself and expect success. “We don’t have any evidence that telling yourself” that a ball looks larger or a golf hole larger “will have the desired effect,” she says.
It’s also impractical to mount a projector over your average golf hole and surround it with photographic illusions.
But Dr. Witt is working on finding ways to create on-field illusions that might make goals look larger to the home football team’s kicker and smaller to the visitors’ kicker. She’s also hoping to find practical courtside methods of producing a similar effect with a basketball hoop.
“We can’t, at the moment, project images down from the ceiling” that would alter perceptions of the hoop size during free throw attempts, she says. “But I’m not saying it couldn’t potentially be done in the future.”
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