ABSTRACT
What exactly is “concentration”, and how is it related to the broader psychological construct of attention? what theories and metaphors best help us to understand attentional processes? why do skilled performers “lose” their concentration? what are the building blocks of effective concentration? how is attention related to situational awareness and visual-perceptual skills? The chapter presents answers for these questions using the principles and findings of cognitive psychology – a discipline that studies how the mind works in acquiring, storing and using knowledge. In psychology, the term “attention” refers to a cognitive system that facilitates the selection of some stimuli for further processing while inhibiting that of other stimuli. In sport and performance psychology, considerable research has been conducted on how experts and novices use their perceptual system to guide their attention. In psychology, “pupillometry” is the objective measurement of mental effort though task-evoked changes in the diameter of the pupil of the eye during cognitive processing.
