Attention training in anxious archers: Chuang 2015

Eighteen university archers in Taiwan, chosen because their competitive anxiety was relatively high, did six weeks of computer training designed to shift attention away from threatening competition-related words and towards positive ones; a control group did the same task without that push. Before and after, the authors measured response times and the brain's electrical activity.

On behaviour the training had no significant effect. The index of attention to threat in the trained group went from -1.07 to -17.15 milliseconds, from a neutral position to a tendency to turn attention away from threatening words; in the control group it went from -15.42 to -6.94. The interaction between group and time of measurement was not significant (p = 0.11).

In the electrical activity something did change. Before training the brain's early response to the visual stimulus, the P1 component, was larger when the signal appeared in place of a positive word than in place of a threatening one; after six weeks, in the trained group, this difference had shrunk significantly over frontal, central and parietal sites, with effect sizes between 0.70 and 1.17. In the control group it did not change significantly, and the next component, the N1, showed no differences. The authors conclude that after training the archers devoted similar resources to positive and threatening stimuli, and that their starting hypothesis is only partly supported.

Out of 60 university archers assessed with a competitive anxiety questionnaire, the 22 in the top third were selected; 18 remained (three could not keep to the schedule, one had a car accident), with a mean score of 21.61 on a scale of 10 to 30. They had about 5 years of competition at national and international level and averaged more than 300 points over 36 arrows at 70 metres. They were randomly allocated, 10 to the training group and 8 to the control group.

The words came from interviews with experienced archers: from 125 threatening and 125 positive words, rated for emotional intensity by six archers, 36 of each kind were chosen (for example "tense", "zero", "lost" and "stable", "relax", "energy"). In the task, after a fixation cross, a threatening word and a positive word appeared side by side for one second, and immediately afterwards two dots replaced one of them, to be judged as horizontal or vertical. In the trained group the dots always appeared in place of the positive word; in the controls, half the time on each side. Training lasted 50 minutes once a week for six weeks, 288 trials per session; the final measurement was taken the day after the last session, with a 32-channel electroencephalogram.

The title itself calls it a preliminary investigation, and the limitations are those of a sample of 18 people split into groups of 10 and 8. In the control group the P1 component changed in the opposite direction with effect sizes similar to those in the trained group, but not significant: with eight people, telling an effect that is there from one that is not is hard. The two groups also started from different attention indices (about -1 and -15 milliseconds), and the P1 result goes in a different direction from the one the authors predicted, since they expected a smaller response to threatening stimuli.

The authors list further limitations: not all participants were highly anxious, state anxiety was not measured, the words were the same for everyone rather than chosen from each archer's own history, and whether what is learned at the computer carries over to the field was not checked. The paper reports neither a second measurement of competitive anxiety after training nor shooting scores. The hypotheses refer to an N2 component, whereas the analysis concerns the N1.

For anyone who shoots the study says nothing about scores or about anxiety in competition, since neither was measured after training. It shows that six weeks of a computer exercise, once a week, did not significantly change how anxious archers respond to competition-related words, while it did change a very early brain response to the visual stimulus.

It is a laboratory finding in a small group, useful to anyone studying how to train attention in archers; it is not evidence that this kind of training reduces competitive anxiety or helps people shoot better under pressure. What remains interesting is the way the words were chosen, starting from what archers themselves say they fear in competition: the score, the zero, the fear of losing.