ECCo Graduate School

The ability to maintain performance despite exposure to stress is critical to success in various high-performance settings, from athletic competitions to emergency situations. In such situations, skilled performance requires choosing what to do and how to do it, while options are in constant flux. Understanding how stress influences performance is important to design training environments that effectively prepare individuals for high-stress situations.

So far, research has focused on the deleterious effects of stress, disrupting attention, decision making, and action. However, stress is also understood as an adaptive state to mobilize the body to cope with stressors. Accordingly, current views have shifted to resilience or even performance improvements when exposed to particular stress levels. While stress has been shown to impair cognitive control, it also directs attention towards the most salient information and increases the body’s readiness to react. Thus, stress might enforce the use of simple decision strategies by using little, but most relevant information. Such strategies might be adaptive in high-stress situations, in which individuals need to quickly choose what to do and execute the respective skill under uncertain circumstances. Therefore, the present project targets potentially positive effects of stress on decision making and acting in sports and other high-stress situations by examining how stress-induced changes in cognitive and motor costs alter decision making.

It is well-established that referees in sports are subject to a variety of biases which can have substantial impact on the outcome of sports competitions. For example, research has shown that factors such as the color of the jersey, the reputation of a player or a team’s home crowd can influence a referee’s decision-making. But what about specific factors inherent to a referee: Could the referee’s body also play a role in making in-game decisions? The approach of embodied choices assumes that current and stored sensorimotor processes are used as important cues during people’s judgment and decision-making processes. Based on this, our research question aims to investigate: Does a referee with specific motor experiences that are more similar to another person’s kinematic abilities judge others’ behavior more accurately? In order to investigate if similar height between referee and player affects the in-game decision making of a referee observational and experimental data on foul situations in the 1^st German basketball league will be analyzed. 

When thinking about an object, the mind not only represents, but also simulates its movement according to physical invariants. These physical invariants include gravity, momentum, friction, centripetal force, and others. To simulate objects’ movements, the mind has, over the course of human history, internalized the physical invariants, called invariant representations. E.g., when someone throws a ball and you watch it fly, you simulate its forward impulse (representational momentum) as well as the gravity acting upon it (representational gravity). A big topic in cognitive sciences is, where do abstract concepts come from? By definition, it is impossible to touch, see, or feel abstract concepts, so what representation is active when thinking about e.g., success? Embodiment theories say that abstract concepts are constructed of experiences. Much research has demonstrated that cognition often steals abilities from one domain to make another more efficient or easier. For example, the concept power comes from ‘looking up’ because taller, bigger people are typically more physically powerful. Therefore, this project is the first to assess whether invariant representations could be a type of experience which we use to understand abstract concepts.

This project demonstrates how Big Data and sports psychology come together in testing sequential decision-making in beach volleyball. For this purpose, we focus on the phenomenon of the "hot hand", i.e. the assumption that a player has a higher chance to score after two or three hits than after two or three misses.

In order to capture Big Data, analyses of sequence decisions of high-performance athletes in more than 1,300 matches were conducted. It was shown that there are differences in base rates of up to 34.0% and that athletes are sensitive to opponent base rates when deciding to who to serve. Furthermore, evidence for hot hand and cold hand phenomena could be found. Now sports psychology comes into play. In an interview study conducted with German national team coaches, various recommended serve strategies based on hot hand beliefs emerged. Results regarding serving strategies vary across coaches, suggesting an ambiguous strategy in German beach volleyball. Based on those results, video experiments for squad athletes were developed in which decision strategies aim to be tested. Here, we try to answer the questions of how sensitively athletes perceive base rate differences and changes, if the athletes believe in the Hot Hand and if this belief is adaptive.

This project is an example of how sports associations and clubs can benefit from interdisciplinary work. In the future, sequential decision analysis, Big Data, sports psychology experiments and diagnostics will be used to generate helpful recommendations for sports decisions based on a simple heuristic like the Hot Hand.

Have you ever considered that a simple change in respiratory frequency may affect your sport performance? In the last decade, breathing techniques such as slow- (SPB) and fast-paced breathing (FPB) have gained increased attention in the scientific and applied field as potential arousal regulating techniques, encompassing both up- and down-regulation. The patterns of change in the autonomic nervous system activity may represent the fundamental mechanisms behind the effects of SPB and FPB on physiological, cognitive, and behavioural indices. This assumed connection has been integrated into the neurovisceral integration model, which postulates that there is a bidirectional link between the heart and brain that may be manipulated through breath modification. While these mechanisms have been specified for SPB, the physiological changes underlying the effects of FPB remain unclear. Therefore, the present project firstly seeks to quantify the changes in sympathetic and parasympathetic activation during FPB, thus setting grounds for future comparison between both techniques on not only physiological but also behavioural levels. Secondly, the potential of both techniques as interventions will be tested in a sport-specific decision-making task. Athletes’ performance profoundly depends on their ability to decide quickly and accurately on what action to choose next and how to execute it. Thus, a performance-facilitating state may be achieved using FPB to decrease reaction and movement time or SPB to enhance cognitive control. Overall, the project has theoretical and practical added value, by integrating breathing effects into the neurovisceral integration model and using a sport-specific task paradigm.

• What is the relationship between motor control, decision making, and mindfulness?
• How can mindfulness help to minimize reinvestment-related performance deteriorations?
• What can such a mindfulness intervention look like?

Addressing these questions, this project delves into the positive effects of mindfulness in the context of the psychological phenomenon reinvestment. Reinvestment is the attempt to consciously control movements using declarative knowledge, or to consciously intervene in decision-making process and to ruminate on previously made decisions. In sport, reinvestment can result in performance decrements, particularly in stressful situations. Specific intervention approaches are needed to counteract these performance degradations and help athletes with a tendency for reinvestment. One approach could be the development of an intervention based on mindfulness connecting body and mind. In contrast to traditional sport psychology techniques, the goal of mindfulness is not to suppress and control negative emotions and thoughts, but to accept them. Accepting poorly made decisions and failed movements without self-castigation may lead to less rumination and less conscious control of movement execution and decision-making process. Consequently, the automated processes and the onset of a flow state could be promoted and the influence of reinvestment could be minimized.