Author: Jung Woo Kim
Editor: Nicole Bowen
Artist: Subhasri Mazumdar
There is nothing worse than the feeling of fumbling at a decisive moment. Be it a sports match, a video game, or even a business negotiation, everyone can relate to a moment of choking under pressure. Top athletes do it all the time. Steph Curry ‘completely choked’ in the 7th game of the 2016 NBA finals, losing the game for the favoured Golden State Warriors. Magnus Carlsen ‘made a historic blunder’ at the 2023 Pro Chess League, failing to notice an obvious winning move. In fact, this phenomenon is so prevalent that it has its own meme in the community of the DOTA 2 Esports video game.
So why do we crack under pressure? Though this phenomenon has likely existed throughout the history of sports, Baumeister (1984) was the first to try and rigorously elucidate the factors that contribute to choking. Namely, he found that increasing amounts of both incentives and self-consciousness had a paradoxical effect on performance. Indeed, there is a huge pressure to perform when one is faced with the chance to win big (as well as the possibility of losing it all). Baumeister’s work has since sparked a trend of psychological research on the choking phenomenon, each with their own theories on the mechanisms that govern this behaviour. However, the neural basis for this phenomenon has always been elusive, given that sports games involve so many interconnected factors, such as the presence of an audience and the team coordination required to play the game. Recently, Smoulder et al. (2024) were able to explore the choking phenomenon by sticking multi-electrode arrays onto their participants as they engaged in a motor skills task. Just one thing: their participants were rhesus monkeys.
Smoulder and his team had a simple goal, which was to determine if non-human animals also choked under pressure, and if they did, what neural mechanisms underlie this behaviour. If successful, this would be the first step toward linking the psychological and the neurological aspects of this phenomenon together. They trained three rhesus monkeys to perform a challenging reaching task in which they had to guide a cursor onto a circular area on a screen quickly and accurately after a short delay. The monkeys were also trained to understand what was up for grabs; the experimenters cued them prior to each task by showing what the potential reward was (small, medium, and large), as well as a rare ‘jackpot’ prize worth 10 times the medium reward. As they had hypothesised, the monkeys’ performance would improve based on reward, due to bigger rewards evoking stronger motivation than smaller ones, but only up to a point. During the more difficult, rare, and high-stakes jackpot tasks, success rates plummeted, with the monkeys often performing worse than in small reward tasks.
Armed with this knowledge, the scientists then analysed the neuronal firing patterns of electrodes placed over the motor cortex of the monkeys. The motor cortex is the part of the brain that coordinates many different muscle groups to produce smooth and intentional motion. They believed that by charting the neural activity during tasks involving different-sized rewards, they would be able to find the relationship between the size of the reward and the neural drive produced in the motor cortex. They found that increasing sizes of rewards directly increases the amount of neural drive, but the sheer size of the jackpot reward pushes the drive further past the optimal ‘sweet spot’ of motivation. This was also linked with a failure in preparing to reach for a target in jackpot rewards, causing more undershooting errors.
Of course, this study is far from being a definitive proof of the neural mechanism of choking. For one, we aren’t monkeys. Also, there are a multitude of other brain regions and other factors, such as social pressure to perform, that are much harder to simulate in a laboratory environment. Nevertheless, Smoulder et al.’s use of multi-electrode arrays allowed for an extremely precise measurement of neural activity that is ethically impossible to achieve in humans, giving us an idea of the role played by our motor cortex in preparing motion in the presence of rewards. Ultimately, these findings reinforce the idea that choking under pressure is a phenomenon across species and invite further research into this very intriguing paradox. As for the rest of us, our takeaway is clear: if placed in a high-stakes situation, don’t monkey around.
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