Dispositional reinvestment and skill failure in cognitive and motor tasks Noel P. Kinrade a, * , Robin C. Jackson a , Kelly J. Ashford a a School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK article info Article history: Received 13 March 2009 Received in revised form 19 February 2010 Accepted 22 February 2010 Available online 1 March 2010 Keywords: Choking Working memory Self-focus Explicit monitoring abstract Objective: The objective of the study was to examine the moderating effect of dispositional reinvestment upon ‘choking’ in motor and cognitive tasks. Method: Sixty-three university students (40 males, 23 females) completed low-complexity (peg-board) and high-complexity (golf putting) tests of motor skill, card sorting and working memory (modular arithmetic) under low-pressure and high-pressure conditions. Results: Pressure had a deleterious effect on performance in the peg-board motor task, led to faster but more error-prone performance in the high-complexity card-sorting task, and led to more errors in the high- complexity modular arithmetic task. High reinvestment scale scores were significantly correlated with performance decrements from low to high-pressure conditions in both the peg-board and golf-putting tasks, and in both modular arithmetic tasks. Conversely, in the card-sorting tasks, higher reinvestment scores were associated with a speeding of performance from the low to high-pressure conditions. Discussion: Our findings suggest that the association between reinvestment and choking extends beyond the motor skill domain to cognitive tasks, particularly those that place significant demands on working memory, and that this relationship is moderated by task complexity. The nature of the relationships between skill failure and sub-scales of the Reinvestment Scale, together with the extent to which these tap into explicit monitoring/conscious processing and distraction-based accounts of choking, is discussed. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Skill failure under stress or ‘choking’ refers to the occurrence of poor performance in spite of high motivation and incentives for success (Baumeister, 1984; Jackson & Beilock, 2007). The processes underlying skill failure have been the focus of considerable interest in the social psychology, motor learning and sport psychology literature over the past two decades, with research conducted on the rein- vestment of explicit knowledge or controlled processing (Masters, 1992; Maxwell, Masters, & Eves, 2000), self-attention and skill- focused attention (Baumeister, 1984; Baumeister & Showers, 1986; Beilock, Carr, MacMahon, & Starkes, 2002), internal and external attentional foci (Shea, Wulf, Whitacre, & Park, 2001; Wulf, Hob, & Prinz, 1998), dispositional factors (Baumeister, 1984; Masters, Polman, & Hammond, 1993) and their interaction (Jackson, Ashford, & Norsworthy, 2006). This has generated a considerable body of evidence in support of what, collectively, Beilock and Carr (2001) call ‘explicit monitoring’ theories of choking. Researchers have suggested that the processes underlying choking may differ for motor and cognitive tasks. In motor tasks, there is considerable evidence that performance is impaired when individuals attempt to exert conscious control over processes that normally run off automatically (Baumeister, 1984; Mullen & Hardy, 2000). For example, Beilock, Carr, et al. (2002) found that experi- enced soccer players performed worse on a slalom course when attending to the point-of-contact of the ball on their foot than when performing a concurrent word-monitoring task. Similarly, Jackson et al. (2006) found that skilled soccer players who set movement- related process goals performed more slowly compared to a control condition. The role of conscious control in performance under pressure was examined by Gray (2004) in the perceptual-motor domain. He found that skilled baseball batters were more accurate at reporting the position of the bat during the hitting action when they were performing poorly than when performance level was high, lending support to the theory that poor performance encourages on-line explicit monitoring of the motor action. Masters (1992) referred to this process as ‘reinvestment’ of explicit knowl- edge and conscious control and considered the applied implications of this process for motor learning. In particular, he hypothesized that skills learned in a manner that minimised the accrual of explicit rules would be more robust under stress or under dual-task conditions that placed significant demands on working memory; the underlying premise being that if performers did not have explicit rules in the first place they would not rely on this information to consciously control their actions under pressure. Support for this hypothesis was initially found in golf putting * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 1895 267383; fax: þ44 1895 269769. E-mail address: noel.kinrade@brunel.ac.uk (N.P. Kinrade). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Psychology of Sport and Exercise journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/psychsport 1469-0292/$ e see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2010.02.005 Psychology of Sport and Exercise 11 (2010) 312e319