AASP Newsletter - September 2016

Aidan Moran, PhD, University College - Dublin

Introduction: My Research and Applied Work
I’m very honored to be given this opportunity to tell you a little about my current research and previous applied work in cognitive sport psychology and to offer a preview of my keynote conference presentation in Phoenix on “Exploring Cognitive Processes in Sport: Old Problems and New Directions” (Friday September 30, at 9:45 am).

Briefly, my research team and I investigate the cognitive processes (e.g., “motor imagery” or the mental rehearsal of actions without engaging in the physical movements involved) underlying expertise in sport, music, and surgery using various measures (e.g., psychometric and chronometric tests and eye-tracking technology). The cornerstone of this research program is the proposition that sport offers psychologists a rich and dynamic natural laboratory in which to study how the mind works under severe time constraints and pressure (Moran, 2009). Put simply, sport is “the brain’s biggest challenge” (Walsh, 2014). Apart from my journal papers, I have published a number of textbooks (the latest of which is Moran & Toner, 2017) and self-help books (e.g., Kremer & Moran, 2013) on sport psychology. I am also the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, a former psychologist to the Irish Olympic team, and a keen tennis player. As I hope to show, I have been guided throughout my career by the wisdom of Lewin’s (1951) famous aphorism: “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” (p. 169).

Although I have advised many talented athletes (ranging from elite junior performers to a world champion and a golf major championship winner), I did not plan to do any applied sport psychology work in my career. It just happened – largely in response to requests from athletes and teams in Ireland in the early 1990s for advice on mental aspects of sport (especially, mental imagery) (Moran, 2014). To explain, having completed my PhD in cognitive psychology (examined by one of my heroes, Donald Broadbent, the eminent cognitive researcher), I taught this subject in University College Dublin and became fascinated by two topics – mental imagery and attention. Unfortunately, when I presented these topics using the standard cognitive textbooks of the day, I soon discovered – usually from a sea of glazed expressions in class – that they were too dull for my students’ tastes. So, searching for a more dynamic way to teach imagery and attention, I began to explore what was known about these topics in competitive sport. Soon, my students and I became intrigued by “mental practice” (now known as motor imagery) and I supervised a host of studies on this topic in golf, tennis, Gaelic games, soccer, and rugby. These studies led to a paper (Driskell, Copper, & Moran, 1994) which presented a meta-analysis of the effects of imagery training on skilled performance. This paper is my most influential publication (having been cited over 900 times to date). That same year (1994), I obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the First International Summer Institute of Cognitive Science in SUNY-Buffalo (New York) and to visit two sport psychology experts whose combination of theory and practice I admired greatly – Shane Murphy (USOC, Colorado Springs) and Bob Singer (University of Florida). As a result of Shane’s and Bob’s generous help and hospitality during that period, I wrote The Psychology of Concentration in Sport Performers: A Cognitive Analysis (Moran, 1996).

So, let’s turn to my keynote.

Preview of My Keynote Presentation
Historically, cognitive psychologists have largely ignored the domain of sport in their quest to understand how the mind works. For example, the subject indices of most textbooks in this field contain few references to terms such as “sport”, “athlete”, or even “motor cognition” (the study of how the mind plans and produces skilled movements). This oversight is attributable, in part, to the fact that in the classical cognitive paradigm, the study of thinking was deemed to be more important than that of bodily experience or motor action. Thus, sport skills were regarded as the (uninteresting) aftermath of cognitive processing. Fortunately, this situation has changed for at least two reasons, and sport has become a “hot topic” in cognitive psychology. Firstly, research inspired by the “embodiment” movement (e.g., Coello & Fischer, 2016) and “simulation theory” (e.g., Jeannerod, 1994) shows that many of the brain circuits responsible for thinking are inextricably linked to those that process sensory experience. In short, cognition is not confined to the brain, but is deeply rooted in sensorimotor (including sporting) experience. For example, when we describe something that we do not understand as being “over our heads”, we are drawing metaphorically on our physical inability to see something directly above us (McNerney, 2011). Secondly, using a “strength-based” approach (MacIntyre et al., 2013), cognitive researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the neural signatures of expert athletes. Against this background, I shall argue in my keynote lecture that the domain of sport offers cognitive researchers a unique and fascinating window on the relationship between imagination, perception, and action. I shall also explore some of the theoretical and applied challenges that arise in the pursuit of these new directions in cognitive sport psychology.