England’s men’s football captain Harry Kane after his team was knocked out of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 quarter final in December 2022 James Williamson/AMA/Getty Images
The prospect of a reward usually motivates us to perform better, but a particularly big one can have the opposite effect – like losing at a penalty shoot-out. Now, researchers have identified a potential brain mechanism that may cause us to choke under pressure.
In 2021, Adam Smoulder at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, and his colleagues showed that non-human primates can also fail to carry out a task …
