Investigating choking under pressure in novice participants across digital and live platforms

The phenomenon of individuals underperforming relative to their typical skill level under stressful situations, or performance pressure, is colloquially known as "choking under pressure." This project aims to investigate two major questions: (a) can a performance pressure paradigm that has proven successful in past laboratory investigations be replicated in an online, self-administered (OSA) environment? and (b) are there reliable individual differences in choking, and if so, do they correlate with psychological traits? These questions are investigated in two experiments in the cognitive and psychomotor domains by training novice participants in modular arithmetic (MA) and golf putting tasks, respectively. Performance pressure was manipulated in participants via a combination of monetary incentives and mock recording performances. In both experiments, the pressure manipulations failed to induce expected choking effects, which were based on the following: (a) changes in performance from baseline to pressure trials, (b) whether participants felt increased perceived pressure, and (c) how strongly participants believed the pressure manipulations. Participants from the in-person/golf putting study even saw improvements in performance from baseline to pressure trials. The reliability estimates for difference-based choking measures were low for both OSA/MA and in-person/golf putting, except for response time (RT) for MA. Correlations were found between the choking measure and some individual difference measures, but this should be interpreted with caution. There was also evidence of a speed-accuracy trade-off in MA, as accuracy and RT were negatively correlated.