Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [407]
Performance psychology: This specialty is concerned with expanding the mental abilities and motor skills used in learning and in many skilled activities, including sports.
In the past two decades, some reputable psychologists (and some who are less than reputable) have made extraordinary claims for the effectiveness of certain performance-increasing methods of training, many of them New Age techniques outside the mainstream of scientific psychology. These include sleep learning, accelerated learning, neurolinguistic programming, biofeedback, the mental rehearsal of athletic skills, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis (moving or altering physical objects by mental effort alone), and others.
Because extensions of human capabilities would be valuable in combat, in 1984 the Army Research Institute asked the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate a number of these unorthodox techniques. The NAS’s National Research Council created a fourteen-member Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance; it consisted largely of psychologists (reputable) and was headed by Robert A. Bjork of the University of California at Los Angeles. The committee and its subcommittees visited ten laboratories to observe techniques, listened to presentations by advocates of the new methods as well as independent consultants, and reviewed a huge literature. The conclusions, some predictable and others surprising, were published in two reports, the first in 1988 and the second in 1991.23 Here are a few of the salient findings about somewhat unorthodox methods of expanding human capabilities. (Later we will hear the conclusions about the more unorthodox ones.)
Training regimes: Many physical trainers and coaches stress the value of “massed practice”—intensive, prolonged practice of a skill. An example is the training offered in tennis “camps,” where students work at their tennis many hours a day for a week or two. Such regimens, the committee reported, do boost performance to high levels in a short time, but the gain is evanescent:
In general, massing of practice on some component of the to-be-learned task produces better performance in the short term (e.g., during training) but much poorer performance in the long term than does spacing of practice. In some cases massed practice yields long-term recall performance less than one-half the level that results from spaced practice, and two massed practices are often not appreciably better than a single study trial.24
The spacing effect holds true not just for motor skills but for verbal ones, particularly language learning. Although this has been known to psychologists for many decades, the short-term gain in skill during massed practice continues to impress coaches and instructors, and to beguile their students. The committee’s findings and the advice of sports psychologists will probably not counteract the sales pitches of the promoters of massed-practice training programs.
Mental practice of motor skills: For some time, sports psychologists have been counseling athletes, musicians, and other practitioners of motor skills to rehearse mentally what they mean to do physically, claiming that this will improve actual performance. A number of athletes and others have testified to the effectiveness of the method. Jack Nicklaus, for one, has said that he never takes a golf shot without first visualizing the precise trajectory of his swing and the flight of the ball. A Chinese pianist, imprisoned for seven years during the Cultural Revolution, played as well as ever soon after his release, and explained that he could do so because during his captivity