Wulf, Töllner, and Shea Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport ©2007 by the American Alliance for Health,

mance, task difficulty An individual’s focus of attention can have a consid-erable effect on motor performance and learning. While it has long been known that expert performance tends to suffer if the performer directs his or her atten-tion to the details of the action (e.g., Baumeister, 1984; Baumeister & Steinhilber, 1984) more recent studies have shown that, even for novice performers, directing attention to one’s movement control is not effective and can be detrimental (e.g., Hodges & Lee, 1999; Singer, Lidor, & Cauraugh, 1993; Wulf & Weigelt, 1997). It has been demonstrated that performing and learning of motor skills can be enhanced if the individual’s attention is directed to the movement effect, for example, on an implement or apparatus (external focus) rather than to the body movements per se (internal focus; for a review, see Wulf & Prinz, 2001). Advantages for learning, when attention is directed to the movement effect as compared to the movement itself, have been shown for a variety of motor tasks, in-cluding a ski-simulator task (Wulf, Höß, & Prinz, 1998