As anyone who has ever performed or been put on the spot will know, anxiety can take its toll, and now researchers from the University of Sussex have pinpointed the network in the brain that is responsible for the slips ups that typically result during high-tension situations using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The team analyzed participants' brain activity while they performed a task that required them to grip an object using a specific amount of force - the participants first performed this task while watching video footage of two people that they were led to believe were watching and evaluating their performance, and then subsequently repeated the task while watching a video of two people they were told were evaluating someone else's performance.
As expected, the participants stated that they felt more anxious when they believed they were being watched and under these conditions, they actually gripped the object harder without realizing it. The scan results then revealed that the inferior parietal cortex (IPC), an area of the brain that helps control fine motor skills, deactivated when the participants believed they were being watched.
The IPC works with the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in order to create an action-observation network (AON), which is involved in the process of inferring what others are thinking.
"We realised that AON might also be related to performance anxiety because when being scrutinised, we tend to care about how the audience is feeling about us and our performance," Michiko Yoshie, who participated in the research., said in a press release.
For people with performance anxiety, there are now a number of methods that can help them overcome the problem such as neurofeedback training and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can activate specific parts of the brain and can subsequently improve behavior.
"It's important to believe that the audience is supporting you and wishing for your successful performance," Yoshie added.
The findings were published in the Jan. 20 issue of Nature.
