A new neural explanation for pressure choking

Any professional who works at a high performance level knows how important it is to keep a cool head during demanding tasks. Choking under pressure or not being able to perform at the highest level when it matters most is an undesirable alternative. Although athletes are often associated with this phenomenon, people choke under pressure in many contexts, such as during tests, presentations, solving puzzles, etc.

A new study from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh reveals a novel neural explanation for pressure choking: a deficit in motor preparation induced by a potential jackpot win that is too large.

To study the impact of pressure choking on motor performance, the researchers recorded the spiking activity of hundreds of motor control neurons in rhesus macaques, which were trained to perform a difficult task to earn rewards of varying sizes. When an unusually large reward was at stake, the animals underperformed, leading the group to examine how cued rewards modulated neuronal population activity during movement preparation.

“By looking at the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex, we found a signature of pressure choking that, at a precision of 100 milliseconds, indicated whether or not a subject would fail on an upcoming trial,” said Adam Smoulder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon and first author of the study. Neuron paper.

“Through a series of three hypotheses, we sought a more mechanistic explanation for pressure-induced choking. We found that rewards interact with target preparation signals to direct neural activity to a region associated with better reach execution and then, at higher rewards, extend beyond that region,” Smoulder said.

“So it seems that increasing motivation by offering larger rewards can improve the discriminability of neural signals, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, we actually see a collapse of neural information, and this is closely related to when animals choke under pressure.”

This level of practical explanation differs from previous, more holistic work because of its high-resolution nature and ability to account for the activity of populations of neurons, compared to the global activity that can be observed with fMRI, or previous work in which only the activity of individual neurons was available.

“It’s hard work to take something that everyone has an intuition about and relate it to neural activity,” noted Aaron Batista, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Our data indicate that subjects appear to become overly cautious and self-policing to their detriment when jackpots are offered. If people trying to avoid choking under pressure are to benefit from our study, we suggest that they might do so by finding the right balance between self-awareness and self-control, and generally letting go when the stakes are raised, even though there is a natural tendency to hold back.”

In terms of useful application, the group believes that knowing what’s going on in your brain can help people cope with and mitigate the risks of choking under pressure.

“Choking under pressure is a really interesting example of where the brain makes mistakes,” added Steve Chase, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Neuroscience Institute.

“Now that we understand a little bit more about how the brain fails in these high-reward situations, we want to try to fix that. One way to do that would be to design techniques that leverage our combined brain-computer interface (BCI) experience to encourage the brain not to do these things and, ultimately, rescue the behavior.”