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Attention and visual imagery: how hyperphantasia influences novice shooters’ performance across different attentional foci

Bahmani, Taghi Ghare-Bagh and Nazemzadegan · International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology

Forty-one novice university students, 21 with extremely vivid imagery and 20 with average imagery, fired a pistol at an electronic target with no instruction, with an instruction to keep their hand steady, and with an instruction to keep the gun steady. People with very vivid imagery kept the same accuracy under all three, while average imagers shot less accurately with either instruction than with none, and less accurately than vivid imagers when told to focus on their hand. The authors suggest vivid imagery may protect against unhelpful attention instructions, though the study had no group without imagery.