Attention

Attention and the ideas around it are very common in sport, and athletes rightly treat it as important for performance. Attention is about taking possession by the mind, in a clear and vivid form, of one out of several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought; it implies withdrawing from some things in order to deal effectively with others. In sport, nothing is more important than paying attention to the task at hand. The idea sounds simple, but psychologists have long recognised that the attention process can be very complex.

In sport, attention describes focusing on one's own role in relation to team-mates, situations and particular stimuli on the field of play, usually accompanied by an increase in readiness to receive and respond. An inability to do this can harm performance even in athletes with the highest skill. A state of attention may begin in many ways — as a conscious, intentional decision, as a normal part of social interaction, or as a reaction to an unexpected event. More broadly, attention is the concentration of mental effort on sensory or mental events, focusing on the relevant environmental cues while eliminating the irrelevant ones.

The old 'all-or-none' idea — that you either concentrate or you don't — is no longer accepted. Instead there are different types of attention focus, each useful for particular sports; these are called attention styles. They can be classified into four types along two independent dimensions: width and direction.

A. Width

Width refers to an athlete's tendency to take in a wide range of information, as opposed to focusing very narrowly on one source while shutting out the rest.

• (a) Broad attention focus allows an athlete to perceive several things at once. An athlete with broad focus is aware of a rapidly changing situation and environment — for example, a batsman focusing on the pace of the ball as well as its seam and swing, or a footballer dribbling while also aware of the space around them.
• (b) Narrow attention focus is the ability to focus on one particular, important task when surrounded by many cues — for example, an athlete listening only to a team-mate's instructions, or concentrating on a specific task rather than being distracted by other information.

B. Direction

Direction refers to where we focus our attention, ranging from an internal state (our own mental or physical state) to an external state (what is happening around us). …