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Sian Beilock's blog on "brain science behind "choking under pressure" and the many factors influencing all types of performance: from test-taking to public speaking to your golf swing. "

Recent work suggests that stereotype threat (ST) harms perfor- mance by reducing available working memory capacity. Is this the only mechanism by which ST can occur? Three experiments examined ST's impact on expert golf putting, which is not harmed when working memory is reduced but is hurt when attention is allocated to proceduralized processes that normally run outside working memory. Experiment 1 showed that well- learned golf putting is susceptible to ST. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that giving expert golfers a secondary task elim- inates ST-induced impairment. Distracting attention away from the stereotype-related behavior eliminates the harmful impact of negative stereotype activation. These results are con- sistent with explicit monitoring theories of choking under pres- sure, which suggest that performance degradation can occur when too much attention is allocated to processes that usually run more automatically. Thus, ST alters information process- ing in multiple ways, inducing performance decrements for different reasons in different tasks.