On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?

Experiments 1-2 examined generic knowledge and episodic memories of putting in novice and expert golfers. Impoverished episodic recollection of specif ic putts among experts indicated that skilled putting is encoded in a proce dural form that supports performance without the need for step-by-step atte ntional control. According to explicit monitoring theories of choking, such proceduralization makes putting vulnerable to decrements under pressure. E xperiments 3-4 examined choking and the ability of training conditions to a meliorate it in putting and a nonproceduralized alphabet arithmetic skill a nalogous to mental arithmetic. Choking occurred in putting but not alphabet arithmetic. In putting, choking was unchanged by dual-task training but el iminated by self-consciousness training. These findings support explicit mo nitoring theories of choking and the popular but infrequently tested belief that attending to proceduralized skills hurts performance.