Have you ever had to perform in a tense situation and have completely failed? You are not alone. Experiments with monkeys show that the "failure under pressure" is associated with a decline in activity in the neurons that prepare for movement 1 .

"You can see it everywhere: in sports, in all different sports and also outside of sport," says Steven Chase, a neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chase and his colleagues examined what happens in the brain that leads to a drop in performance and published their results on September 12th in the magazine Neuron .

The failure under pressure is not only reserved for humans. Just as a tennis player can miss a decisive blow, monkeys can also do badly in highly rewarding situations.

The big profit

The research team set up a computer -aided task in which rhesus monkeys received a reward after they moved a cursor quickly and precisely. Each attempt, the monkeys received evidence of whether the reward would be small, medium, large or a "jackpot". Jackpot rewards were rare and unnecessary, which created a high-risk, highly rewarding situation.

by means of a small chips with electrodes that were implanted into the brains of the monkeys, the team observed how the neuronal activity between the reward scenarios changed. The chip was placed in the motor cortex, an area of ​​the frontal appeal that is responsible for motor skills.

The researchers found that in jackpot scenarios, the activity of the neurons associated with motor preparation decreased. Motor preparation is the way the brain does calculations to complete a movement - similar to the alignment of an arrow to a destination before you let go of it. The decline in motor preparation meant that the brains of the monkeys were not optimally prepared, which led to an underperformance.

The results "help us to understand how reward -dependent behavior is not linear," says Bita Moghaddam, a behavioral neurosciiscient at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

to a certain extent, "you just don't do better the greater the reward," explains Moghaddam. It would also be interesting to see how other brain regions react in jackpot reward situations, it adds because several regions could be involved.

optimal preparation

The researchers then examined why the motor preparation in high -risk scenarios decreases. An analysis of how motivation is related to the performance of the monkeys by rewards and the neural preparation indicated that neural activity reaches a point of optimal preparation when the reward size increases. In the event of even larger rewards, the preparation begins to remove, which pushes the brain out of its optimal performance. The researchers call this the hypothesis of neuronal bias.

The team is also interested in whether failure can be avoided under pressure, says Chase. For example, he wonders whether feedback could help with his own brain activity to optimize performance. But first the phenomenon has to be examined closer to humans, he says.