Study links choking under pressure to the brain region that controls movement
Have you ever been in a high-stakes situation in which you needed to perform but completely bombed? You’re not alone. Experiments in monkeys reveal that ‘choking’ under pressure is linked to a drop in activity in the neurons that prepare for movement.
Using a tiny, electrode-covered chip implanted into the monkeys’ brains, the team watched how neuronal activity changed between reward scenarios. The chip was situated on the motor cortex, an area of the frontal lobe that controls movement. The results “help us understand how reward-outcome-mediated behaviour is not linear”, says Bita Moghaddam, a behavioural neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
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