Dancing gorillas, flashing red lights on the dashboard and white noise in a chorus of feedback. A cluster F%&K on the muppet continuum…
Under pressure, high stress, high stakes decision making and under performance – do we need to get better at managing our cognitive load, managing our cognitive resources and mitigating against cognitive bandwidth depletion? Could this enhance coach and practitioner personal and MDT performance?
How much cognitive bandwidth someone has to execute cognitive tasks is dependent on a number of factors. In medicine, military and in other ‘life and death’ decision making professions the cognitive ability of practitioners has been assessed and the findings are compelling. In high stress, high pressure situations human cognitive functioning and performance outcomes are suboptimal with decision makers narrowing their field of vision, funnelling past and filtering out what could be critical information and becoming blind to the unfolding situation, perceiving what they have deemed to be most critical and locking in to tasks that may well have become redundant. Check out the link decision-making link for more on DM science.
- When under pressure, how much important information and clues do we miss?
- In stressful situations, what do we perceive as important?
- When an unpredictable ‘high stakes’ decision is required, how do we manage it?
Sport is not life and death but it can be high stakes, high pressure, high stress and emotionally draining. For practitioners and coaches working together both in training and competition environments could some of the findings of Cognitive Load research assist in driving better interactions, better decision making and essentially better outcomes in the high performance arena?
