Maintaining concentration under conditions of failure stress : one predictor of success in varsity University football players

The purpose of this study was to compare outstanding and average athletes in their ability to perform a dual-attention task under failure instructions and control conditions in order to determine if failure stress had significantly different effects on subjects with two levels of athletic ability. The study attempted to establish that peripheral vision, represented by resistance to two types of attentional narrowing, could adequately differentiate the two athletic ability levels, and ultimately be used as a variable in the prediction of successful athletes.

Thirty-two varsity football players were selected from The University of Tennessee football team on the basis of their athletic ability established from ratings by two members of the varsity coaching staff. They were divided into two groups of sixteen each (outstanding and average); half of each group served as experimental (failure stress) subjects and half as controls (no stress).

The dual-task apparatus consisted of a pursuit rotor device and lights located at different locations along the periphery. Performance was measured by time-on-target (in seconds) and correct identification of an energized bulb (one or two points credit). All subjects per-formed 15 twenty-second trials at both 45 and 60 rpm pursuit rotor speeds. Lights were presented on a pseudorandomized schedule both in occurrence and location. Scores from both tasks were subjected to analysis of covariance on the three independent variables that were employed. These independent variables were: time-on-target peripheral recognition score, and peripheral location accuracy.

The results demonstrated that outstanding athletes have better overall peripheral vision under failure stress than average athletes while performing a demanding central task. The outstanding athletes, however, did not perform significantly better than the average athletes when attention to the distal portion of the periphery was compared.