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The purpose of this study was to identify those major psychological factors that affect ice hockey performance. The exploration of the differences in CSAI-2, ACSI-28 and STPI-Y psychometric measures targeted the adult national team members and the U-18 age-group of ice hockey players in Hungary. U-18 (n = 27) and adult national ice hockey players (n = 25) filled out the tests during a training camp before international preliminary round matches. It was found that State Anxiety, Cognitive Anxiety and Somatic A-State were significantly lower in the adult national team players than in the U-18 group of players. Also, the adult team demonstrated a significantly higher score in relation to Peaking under Pressure and also in Freedom from Worry than the 18 year-old group. Discriminant analysis showed that Cognitive A-State, Trait Curiosity, Coachability, State Anger, Freedom from Worry, and State Depression differentiate the adult team from the U-18 players. We can conclude that the members of the adult team are generally in a more beneficial state from the standpoint of anxiety pressure, and worry than the U-18 group. It seems that the experienced players can better manage unexpected events (stress situations) than the younger players.

The characteristics of acquiring new sequence information under dual-task situations have been extensively studied. A concurrent task has often been found to affect performance. In real life, however, we mostly perform a secondary task when the primary task is already well acquired. The effect of a secondary task on the ability to retrieve well-established sequence representations remains elusive. The present study investigates whether accessing well-acquired probabilistic sequence knowledge is affected by a concurrent task. Participants acquired non-adjacent regularities in an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task. After a 24-hour offline period, participants were tested on the same probabilistic sequence learning task under dual-task or single-task conditions. Here, we show that although the secondary task significantly prolonged the overall reaction times in the primary (sequence learning) task, access to the previously learned probabilistic representations remained intact. Our results highlight the importance of studying the dual-task effect not only in the learning phase but also during memory access to reveal the robustness of the acquired skill.

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