Transcription
Hi, I'm Dr. Molly Gabrien, and this is part two in this series on attentional focus. So, if you didn't watch part one, definitely go watch part one. Some of these videos, you can kind of jump into any point and basically understand what's going on. This one, I think you really have to watch the first one to understand what an internal focus is versus an external focus.
Um, okay, so we've been talking about athletes, and yes, this works much better in athletes. But what about musicians? Um, so there haven't been a ton of studies on musicians, but there have been some. Um, the first one that I'm going to talk about is a very simple mechanical study. Um, so in this study, these were music majors, most of whom were not pianists as their primary instruments. So they were taking secondary piano lessons. There were some pianists, we'll talk about them separately at the end. But these were music majors, piano was their secondary instrument, and all they had to do was play this, you guys can all read it, as evenly as possible. So that was the goal. So they practiced playing this AF AF AF thing, and there were four different focus conditions: focus on the fingers, the movement of the fingers; focus on the movement of the keys; focus on the movement of the hammers, like the hammers of the piano; and then focus on the sound. And again, the goal is to play as evenly as possible.
Then, in the test condition, they had to play the opposite. So instead of AF AF AF, FAF AF AF. Not really a big difference, right? But they did find a really big difference in evenness for the people who focused on the sound, especially as opposed to the fingers. So in this graph here, lower is better, and you can see that the sound is the best, the fingers are the worst, the other ones are kind of in between, as a function of how far away from their body the various different conditions were.
So, I said we'd talk about the pianists separately. So, like I said, most of the people in this study were taking piano as their secondary instrument. There were a few pianists who piano was their primary instrument in the study, and for them, the focus of attention did not make any difference. Um, because basically, this is really easy to play if you're pianists, and so the internal focus condition did not interfere in any way with them being able to play it well. So it's called a floor effect, that all the conditions are just so easy that like, they really don't make a difference.
But what about things like musicality? Like, yeah, maybe it'll make us more precise or whatever, but we don't want to sound like robots. So does this work for bigger picture things that we very much care about as musicians? So there was a study that took musicians that played a whole bunch of different instruments. You can see them up here on the screen. And, um, they set this, the study up in such a way that it was as close to a concert as possible, like they played in a concert hall and all this stuff in front of an audience. And everybody went in, and they were not given any instructions. They were just asked to perform a self-selected piece. Then they were either asked to adopt an internal focus or an external focus. So the internal focus condition, they were asked to think about the movement of their fingers, or if they were singers, the movements of their, their lips and tongue and getting correct notes. That was the internal focus condition. The external focus condition asked them to focus on the expressivity and playing for the audience. After they did their internal focus or external focus condition, they switched. So if they did internal focus, then they did external focus. If they did external, then they did internal. So everybody did all three conditions: control, internal, external. But the order of internal and external was randomized. Their performances were then evaluated by professional musicians who were asked to rate all of the performers on a variety of different technique parameters and expressivity parameters. So there are a whole bunch of different things that they had to rate the people on. And then everybody was given a technique score and an expressivity musicality score.
You can see in these graphs here that once again, the external focus group got higher scores. And note that they got higher scores not just in expressivity, but also in technique. So basically focusing on technique, so movements of your fingers and correct notes, that was the internal focus condition. Those people got lower scores not only on expressivity but also on technique. So an external focus not only will make you a more compelling player, but you'll be more accurate too.
This result is backed up by two other studies that were done on singers. There's an interesting difference between these two singer studies, though. So one of the singer studies was done on voice majors. The other singer study was done on non-majors who were taking a guitar, percussion, um, recorder class. So they're just trying to fulfill their fine arts credit, probably. Um, for the voice majors, when they focused on something further away from their bodies, so singing to the back of the hall or filling the space with their voice, that's when they did the best. For the novice singers, the non-majors, they did the best also when they adopted an external focus. But for them, they did better when it was closer to their body. So focus on singing for the microphone versus like the back of the hall.
So that gets us into this other really interesting aspect of this research, which is when you adopt an external focus, what are you going to focus on? There's so many things outside your body, right? Where you could attend, you could attend to what's going to be the most helpful for you. So let's start looking at this research. So an obvious place to look at this idea of proximity of focus outside your body is in golf, right? There's lots of different ways you can focus your attention outside your body. In this research, the terms that are often used for these different distances of focus are a distal focus, so that's a focus far away from your body, versus a proximal focus, so that's a focus close to your body. And when they test expert golfers, they find that when they ask the golfers to focus on the straight flight of the ball through the air, so that's a distal focus, that is better than focusing on the movement of the head of the club, club that's closer to their bodies. But novice golfers do better when they focus on the head of the club versus focusing on the straight flight of the ball. So that's the same thing we saw in the singers. The more expert you are, a more distal, far away focus is going to be better. The more of a beginner you are, a proximal, close to you focus is going to be better.
The same thing was found in volleyball with high-skilled volleyball players versus low-skilled volleyball players. This one is interesting because of what the proximal focus condition was. So focus close to your body. So the distal focus, something far from your body, was to focus on aiming the ball towards a specific target. The proximal focus was to focus on your platform, which is what the person in this picture is doing with her arm. She's making a platform with her arms. And so the proximal focus asks the volleyball players to to focus on making a good platform. You will notice that that is actually talking about body parts, right? Because you're making this platform with your arms. But the research does note that you can talk about body parts if you're using it as part of an analogy. We'll come back to that later for sure. Um, but thinking about the arms as a platform is considered an external focus because it's not saying like, put your elbows together and do this with your wrists and whatever. I know nothing about volleyball, can you tell? Um, so but anyways, so the far away focus, the distal focus, was aimed towards this specific target with the volleyball. The close, the proximal focus was, think about your, your platform. And as you can see in this graph, the expert volleyball players did better with the distal focus aimed to the target. The novice volleyball players, the low-skilled volleyball players, did better with the proximal focus, think about your platform.
They've even found this with the stabilometer, so that seesaw type thing. So, um, we talked before about the internal focus was focusing on your feet. The external focus was focusing on the tapes. So they've actually done experiments where they put the tapes in different places to see if it makes a difference. So, um, a proximal focus would be the tapes like right in front of your feet. A distal focus would be the the tapes far away from your feet. So they put them like way outside the feet, as you can see in this picture, or like right next to each other in the middle of the stabilometer, like in the middle of the feet. But they were equidistant from the feet, either on the outside or on the inside. And, um, again, they find that the further away these tapes are from the feet, the better people do. And it didn't matter if they were outside the feet or inside the feet. You can see from this graph here that the two distal focus conditions are essentially the same.
Okay, if you're a teacher right now, your brain is probably like exploded, like mine was when I first learned about this. And also, you're thinking, okay, wait, if I can't talk about body parts, how am I ever going to teach beginners? Like, if I can't correct what people's bodies are doing, like, people's technique is going to get messed up, their form is going to be terrible. Like, what, what, what do I do with this as a teacher? So that's what part three is for. See you over in part three.