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June 25, 2008

If You're So Good, Stop Thinking So Damn Much

Call it the "Nuke" Laloosh rule: People who know what they are doing should just stop futzing about and get on with things. The preceding is the main finding in a fascinating golf-driven (!) new paper in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology:

Novice and skilled golfers performed a series of imaged golf putts followed by a series of actual golf putts under instructions that emphasized either speeded or nonspeeded imaging/putting execution. Novices putted less accurately (i.e., higher putting error score) following either putting or imagery instructions in which speed was stressed. Skilled golfers showed the opposite pattern. Although more time available to execute a skill enhances novice performance, this extra time harms the proceduralized skill of experts. Manipulating either actual execution time or imagined execution time produces this differential impact on novice and skilled performance outcomes. These results are discussed in terms of the functional equivalence between imagery and action and expertise differences in the attentional control structures governing complex sensorimotor skill execution.

It's a great example of how, if you know what you are doing, you need to get your brain the hell out of the way, whether it's golf, trading, etc.

[via QJEP]

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