Sian Beilock

Sian Leah Beilock
Sian L. Beilock — Rome, Italy, December 2007
Born	Berkeley, California, USA
Residence	Chicago, Illinois, USA
Citizenship	USA
Fields	Psychology, education, neuroscience
Alma mater	University of California, San Diego
Known for	science of choking under pressure;
Notable awards	2012 Outstanding Early Career Award (Psychonomic Society);Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award for Young Psychologists (2011-American Psychological Foundation)

Sian L. Beilock is a Professor at the University of Chicago. She works on research concerning choking under pressure in sports and other fields. She is a member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, and serves on their Committee on Education.

Beilock attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received a BS in Cognitive Science (with a minor in Psychology). She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from Michigan State University in 2003. From 2003 to 2005, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Miami University. Since 2005, she has been on the faculty at the University of Chicago.

During and subsequent to her PhD research, Beilock explored differences between novice and expert athletic performances. Her work demonstrated that because well-learned motor skills are performed largely outside conscious awareness, expert performers have poorer memories for the step-by-step process of their actions than their less experienced counterparts, which she termed "expertise-induced amnesia". This discovery led Beilock to propose the explicit monitoring theory of choking under pressure, whereby stressful situations cause a breakdown in highly learned motor skills because, in an effort to control performance and ensure success, individuals pay attention to details of their actions that would normally run unconsciously, disrupting otherwise fluid performances.

Later in her career, Beilock's research focused on why people perform poorly in stressful academic situations, such as taking a high-stakes mathematics exam. Beilock found that worries during those situations rob individuals of the working memory or cognitive horsepower they would normally have to focus. Working memory is similar to a mental scratchpad, facilitating the manipulation of information held in consciousness. When working memory is compromised, performance can suffer. Counter-intuitively, Beilock demonstrated that those students who have the highest working memory are the ones most likely to perform poorly in stressful exam situations. Because people with more working memory rely on their brainpower more, they can be affected to a greater extent in stressful academic situations. There is debate about how to interpret high-stakes test scores. Beilock's work demonstrated that stressful situations during tests might diminish meaningful differences between students that, under less-stressful situations, might exhibit greater differences in performance. This work raises the possibility that high-stakes standardized tests have been filtering out and excluding persons with the most working memory from acceptance to programs, jobs, and institutions which use such tests as screening mechanisms. Beilock's research on choking was chronicled in PBS’s Nova program "How Smart Can We Get?"