How Choking Under Pressure Works

This piece, by Mariano Frare-Finnerty, was published on MM/DD/YY. The original text, by Smoulder et al., was published by Neuron on 10/23/24.

It is known that incentives, whether money or some type of reward, usually cause one to be more motivated or perform better. However, it is also true that some high rewards tend to have the opposite effect on an individual, leading to mistakes in situations where one has prepared for a long time. In other words, choking under pressure is a term we are all too familiar with. But what is the neurological reasoning behind such phenomena? Smoulder et al. might have had the answer to this question, as their study aimed to investigate the neural basis of choking under pressure by examining how reward anticipation affects movement preparation in the brain.

Smoulder et al. used rhesus monkeys trained to perform a problematic reach task in their study. The researchers observed that their performance improved as their expectations of rewards increased. However, the monkeys' accuracy declined when there was the expectation of a substantially bigger reward. To dive deeper into the phenomena and the neural reasoning resulting in this effect, the researchers recorded activity from the motor cortex (MC), the part of the brain responsible for planning and executing movements. 

The study explored three possible explanations for choking under pressure: The Insufficient Drive Hypothesis, The Neural Noise Hypothesis, and the Neural Bias Hypothesis. The Insufficient Drive Hypothesis suggests that the anticipation of an extreme reward can lead to someone having less motivation, which results in a lower engagement in movement preparation. On the other hand, The Neural Noise Hypothesis suggests that excessive pressure may produce instability in neural signals, which results in erratic motor outputs. Nevertheless, the strongest hypothesis was the Neural Bias Hypothesis, which meant that while moderate rewards push neural activity toward an optimal preparatory state, excessively high rewards drive this activity too far, which disrupts movement execution. Put simply, the brain is almost too prepared or too ready for the task it is about to take on, which causes the brain to overshoot the balance needed for accuracy. 

These study findings are significant as they reveal that choking under pressure may not merely be a psychological phenomenon that most people think it is but instead rooted neurally. Thus, the anticipation of grand rewards can interfere tremendously with the brain's ability to execute well-coordinated movements, especially when the pressure is most intense. Therefore, future research must explore different methods to help people maintain their performance standards under extreme pressure.

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