The theory of reinvestment

Abstract

This review provides an overview of a diverse, temporally distributed, body of literature regarding the effects of conscious attention to movement. An attempt is made to unite the many different views within the literature through Reinvestment Theory (Masters, 1992; Masters, Polman, & Hammond, 1993), which suggests that relatively automated motor processes can be disrupted if they are run using consciously accessed, task-relevant declarative knowledge to control the mechanics of the movements on-line. Reinvestment Theory argues that the propensity for consciousness to control movements on-line is a function of individual personality differences, specific contexts and a broad range of contingent events that can be psychological, physiological, environmental or even mechanical.

Keywords:

• conscious motor processing
• deautomaticity
• movement disruption
• self-focus
• implicit motor learning

Notes

1. The renowned Danish virtuoso pianist, Victor Borge, captured the essence of this decoupling when discussing one of his optimal playing experiences with another renowned virtuoso pianist and conductor, Vladimir Ashkenazy: ‘Has it ever frightened you to play, and watch your fingers moving, and not know who it is that is making them move?’ (Saturday Matters with Sue Lawley, BBC Television, October 1980).

2. It is possible that an external focus of attention may encourage implicit motor learning. Poolton, Maxwell, Masters, and Raab (2006), for example, showed that an external focus of attention when learning to golf putt (focus on the hands) resulted in accumulation of significantly less task-relevant declarative knowledge than an internal focus of attention (focus on the putter head).

3. Evidence that bears this out suggests that the benefits of an external focus are greater for complex than simple skills (Wulf, Töllner, & Shea, 2007). Wulf et al. argued that simple skills are already controlled at a relatively automatic level so they benefit little from an external focus, but a more parsimonious explanation is that an external focus diverts attention away from reinvestment, which is considerably more threatening to complex skills with many moving parts as it were.

4. A direct prediction from this work and the work of Hatfield and colleagues and Hung et al. is that people who learn a movement implicitly (with minimal task-relevant declarative knowledge) will maintain high psychomotor efficiency under pressure (i.e., limited activity in the verbal-analytical regions of the left hemisphere, low EEG coherence), compared to people who learn a movement explicitly (with a high level of task-relevant knowledge).

5. Kinsbourne and Cook (1971) used a simple dual task paradigm to show that speaking is more disruptive to right handed than left handed motor activities and fMRI studies show strong lateralized activation for verbalisation (Frost, Binder, Spring, & Hammeke, 1999).

6. It is worth also considering the views of Gazzaniga (2000), based on studies of split-brain patients, that the left hemisphere plays a pivotal role in generating hypotheses, and conscious self-regulation processes (see also Niebauer, 2004, who discusses the role of the left hemisphere in self-awareness and rumination).

7. In fact, no fall occurred in the external focus condition and the fall occurrence differences approached significance (p =.09) despite the small numbers involved.

8. Norman and Shallice (1986; see also Shallice, 1982; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977) describe an attention mechanism (the supervisory attention system) that has evolved to override automatic actions with conscious attention and argue that it is used in ‘non routine’ situations when cognition realizes that the automated response is inadequate or inappropriate (e.g., habitual responses to be avoided, making plans, decision making). Situations in which motivation is high to perform successfully can evoke such cognitions.

9. Schweinfurth, Billante, & Courey (2002) reported that one in five people who suffer from spasmodic dysphonia (uncontrollable contractions of the laryngeal muscles) have experienced a major life event immediately prior to onset.

10. Older adults who lack confidence or who are faced with uncertainty, as is typical of older adults engaging in fine motor tasks, tend to assume explicit control over movements (Heuninckx, Wenderoth, Debaere, Peeters, & Swinnen, 2005).

11. Bawden and Maynard (2001) reported a qualitative study of the yips experience in eight cricket bowlers. Inductive content analysis using a triangulation process (100% agreement for higher-order themes) revealed a general dimension of conscious control in the yips experience, consisting of 3 higher-order themes: ‘self-questioning’, ‘trying to consciously control the bowling action’ [or reinvestment] and ‘compensatory strategies’. Furthermore, Bawden and Maynard report that all of the bowlers cited high self-consciousness as one of their personal characteristics.

12. We are aware of the irony of the phrase.