Abstract

The current thesis presents novel empirical findings and literature review concerning attention in elite athletes. Past studies have suggested that optimal motor performance is characterized by automaticity on two accounts. In terms of intensive attention, skilled athletes have demonstrated less effort than lesser-skilled performers as indicated by, for example, cortical activity. In terms of selective attention, a large body of evidence suggests that motor performance is optimal when attention is not directed at task execution itself. However, these findings have often been obtained from motor tasks of limited complexity, from a limited number of sports, and typically with athletes far below the highest performance levels. Hence, an experiment was conducted to explore mental effort and performance in elite rowers competing at the highest level and a group of lesser-skilled recreational rowers. Participants engaged in a rowing ergometer task across conditions that varied in terms of cognitive load and physical load. Mental effort was measured via eye-tracking (i.e., pupillometry and blink rates) and questionnaires, performance was measured via ergometer data output, and movement patterns (i.e., kinematics) were measured via motion capture technology. Overall, the current findings challenge the role of automaticity in elite sports performance. Specifically, the results suggested that increased cognitive load led to increased mental effort, reduced performance, and altered kinematics in rowers across skill levels. Elites demonstrated similar or greater mental effort than non-elites, depending on the measure in question, across all conditions. Further, a critical review of literature suggests that several past findings that have been interpreted as support for automaticity might be reinterpreted as evidence of task-relevant information processing. The findings of the current thesis are in line with theories suggesting that attentional resources and cognitive control are important for skilled motor performance. Benefits of automaticity may not be applicable to complex performance settings at the highest levels of sports. Consequently, practitioners and scholars should keep exploring how athletes may spend mental effort optimally and attend to task-relevant information in their given context.