Building a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive drivers of performance under pressure: An international multi-panel Delphi study

IntroductionThe ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport. Despite recognition that such performance depends on a range of cognitive factors, how common these factors are across performance domains remains unclear. The current study sought to integrate existing knowledge in the performance field in the form of a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie performance under pressure.MethodsInternational experts were recruited from four performance domains [(i) Defense; (ii) Competitive Sport; (iii) Civilian High-stakes; and (iv) Performance Neuroscience]. Experts rated constructs from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework (and several expert-suggested constructs) across successive rounds, until all constructs reached consensus for inclusion or were eliminated. Finally, included constructs were ranked for their relative importance.ResultsSixty-eight experts completed the first Delphi round, with 94% of experts retained by the end of the Delphi process. The following 10 constructs reached consensus across all four panels (in order of overall ranking): (1) Attention; (2) Cognitive Control—Performance Monitoring; (3) Arousal and Regulatory Systems—Arousal; (4) Cognitive Control—Goal Selection, Updating, Representation, and Maintenance; (5) Cognitive Control—Response Selection and Inhibition/Suppression; (6) Working memory—Flexible Updating; (7) Working memory—Active Maintenance; (8) Perception and Understanding of Self—Self-knowledge; (9) Working memory—Interference Control, and (10) Expert-suggested—Shifting.DiscussionOur results identify a set of transdisciplinary neuroscience-informed constructs, validated through expert consensus. This expert consensus is critical to standardizing cognitive assessment and informing mechanism-targeted interventions in the broader field of human performance optimization

Cognitive Fitness Framework: Selecting and Training for High Performance

Performance psychology is rapidly expanding into a growing range of applications - from firefighters and emergency medicine, to sport, performing arts, and the military. These user groups share a common focus on striving for superior performance in challenging tasks under stressful conditions. What it takes to sustain performance under pressure is remarkably common across these occupations. The factors contributing to such performance go beyond mere ‘wellness’ (i.e., the absence of pathology) and include – apart from knowledge and skills – a range of ‘capacity’ factors, such as strength, endurance, and flexibility, that are best summarized by the concept of ‘fitness’. This symposium will introduce the Cognitive Fitness Framework (CF2; Aidman, 2020) developed to assemble the key drivers of cognitive performance across these multiple domains. By integrating the concepts of mental fitness (Seligman, 2008), cognitive readiness (Grier, 2012; Crameri et al., 2021) and the growing consensus on key domains of cognitive functioning (RDoC; Morris and Cuthbert, 2012; Yücel et al., 2019), the CF2 enables neuroscience evidence to inform high performance applications, some of which will be presented by symposium speakers. The symposium will showcase an RDoC-derived expert consensus developed over a set of cognitive primaries such as self-awareness, inhibition control, task switching, and cognitive flexibility and a prototype program to train them as the enablers of the development of cognitive skills, from remembering and problem solving to job-specific competencies and more complex fitness attributes such as frustration tolerance and resistance to distraction