Teaching Athletes to Understand Their Attention Is Teaching Them to Concentrate

Abstract

Concentration, focusing on the most relevant information for further processing, is regarded as a prerequisite for successful sporting performance. Athletes must possess awareness, knowledge, and controllability of their attention to concentrate effectively. One way to develop this awareness, knowledge, and controllability of attention is through the mechanism of meta-attention -thinking about, knowing about, and controlling attention. Meta-attention illuminates the underlying cognitive mechanisms that direct the attentional spotlight. We open with a brief background of attention and outline how concentration can be understood through a metacognitive lens. Next, we present Think Aloud Level 3 as a tool for capturing meta-attentional processes during sport performance. Finally, we discuss the applied implications of adopting a meta-attentional approach to understand concentration.

Neural Efficiency in Athletes: A Systematic Review

“…Moreover, neural performance appears to be related to the amount and quality of training received. We examined the neuroscientific evidence from those studies, which revealed that long-term specific training might improve athletes' top-down processing pathway connectivity (Oliver et al, 2020 ). It is beneficial to the effect of unconscious resources in the frontal region on motor processing in the early stage, which improves the efficiency in fast-task response performance.…”

Effects of a Psychological Intervention Program on Competitive Anxiety and Psychological Profile in Young Soccer Players

“…Third, in reference to the scores we obtained through the IPED fthere was a significant increase in attentional control for experimental group (but not control group) participants. Again, existing literature has highlighted different techniques such as Mindfulness (Kittler et al, 2022) and the provision of knowledge to enhance athletes’ attention abd meta-attention, (Oliver et al, 2021). We suspect that this type of task could have contributed to our experimental participants’ improved attentional control.…”