State anxiety and motor performance: testing the conscious processing hypothesis

Previous research has argued that skills acquired explicitly are more likely to fail under stressful conditions than skills that have been learned implicitly. The present study addressed an alternative explanation for the robustness under stress of implicit task performance. As implicit learners acquired the skill of golf putting while generating random letters, it is possible that they became desensitized to self-generated verbalizations and thus immune to the effects of competitive anxiety. We tested this interpretation while controlling for a further rival hypothesis generated by Eysenck's Processing Efficiency Theory. We also examined the effect of increased state anxiety on the kinematic processes underlying performance breakdowns. For task performance, we found evidence that partially supported the conscious processing hypothesis, while the results of the kinematic analysis of the putting stroke were equivocal. Analysis of self-reported effort scores provided partial support for processing efficiency theory.     

General and Specific Factors in Reading Comprehension

One explanation for why many students routinely choose to do their homework with a radio or TV operating is that this distraction facilitates studying. To investigate the validity of this explanation, the authors carried out two experiments with sixth-grade students who worked on two difficulty levels of individualized mathematics assignments (N = 12) and reading assignments (N = 9) under three distraction conditions: quiet; self-selected, self-regulated radio; and self-selected, self-regulated TV. The data yielded no evidence of sizable distractor effects on students' time spent studying, computational accuracy, reading comprehension, or reading rate. These results generally are consistent with the theoretical conceptualization of attention as flexible and adaptable.