What makes a Winner? -
The Psychology of Expertise in Sport
Research on athletic expertise has at least two capital implications for enriching our understanding of how the mind works. First, perhaps surprisingly, the attempt to discover what makes a winner in sport has highlighted the importance of cognitive rather than physical factors in determining athletic success.
To explain : research evidence suggests increasingly that expertise in sport is attributable more to the mind of the performer (e.g., "software" processes such as anticipation and concentration skills) than to his or her distinctive physical characteristics (or "hardware").
Second, research on expert athletes has led to a resurgence of interest in the role of certain kinds of finely-targeted practice in shaping excellence. Put simply, modern psychological research has shown that there is no such thing as a "difficult" task - only an un-practised one. If this principle is valid, then it could be argued optimistically that the only limits in our mind are those imposed by the level of our willingness to practise deliberately the skills which we wish to improve.
Aidan Moran is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Psychology Research Laboratory, University College Dublin.
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