Expertise differences in attentional control between and within baseball batters

A simulated baseball batting task was used to investigate the role of attention in hitting performance for expert and novice baseball players. In Experiment 1, we compared the relative effects of attending to stimuli in the external environment (tone frequency) and attending to skill execution (bat movement) on batting performance for college players. When non-switch hitters batted from their preferred plate side or switch-hitters batted from either plate side, attending to the external environment had no significant effect relative to single task performance while attending to skill execution degraded batting performance. When non-switch hitters batted from their non-preferred plate side the exact opposite pattern of results was found. In Experiment 2, we compared the relative effects of attending to stimuli in the external environment presented either within or between swings for novice and expert batters. For experts, attending to the external environment had no significant effect relative to single task performance in the within condition but significantly degraded performance in the between condition. Novices showed the exact opposite pattern of results. These findings are consistent with the dominant theories of skill acquisition and indicate that the optimal attentional focus varies substantially across and within performers of different levels of expertise.