Attention and Skilled Performance Under Pressure in Sport

Athletes sometimes perform poorly precisely when success matters most, yet pressure also accompanies exceptional performance. Explaining this divergence requires greater precision than the instruction to concentrate harder. This critical narrative review examines how anxiety, conscious movement control, preparation routines, and practice conditions relate to skilled performance under pressure. A purposive search of scholarly records, publisher pages, and accessible research texts, completed on 21 September 2026, informed an integration of foundational experiments, intervention studies, evidence syntheses, and a recent professional position statement. The literature supports distinguishing attention diverted toward threat from attention directed toward the mechanics of a well-learned action. These processes have different implications, and neither can be inferred reliably from a missed attempt alone. Evidence for preparation routines, quiet-eye training, and pressure practice is encouraging, although study design, sample size, and transfer to competition constrain interpretation. Claims of a general advantage for external attentional focus require particular caution following a publication-bias-adjusted reanalysis. The review develops a temporal account of attentional preparation that separates planning, preparation, execution, and review between attempts. Its central argument is that technical knowledge need not be suppressed; its use should be examined in relation to the proficiency of the specific movement and the moment at which the knowledge is applied. Four propositions are offered for prospective testing, alongside an evaluation approach that separates pressure exposure, perceived pressure, attentional process, and performance. Effective preparation is framed as the capacity to maintain useful action while adapting to consequential situations, rather than as the elimination of anxiety.