Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In cognitive psychology, dual-task investigations have indicated that internal language plays a role in a variety of cognitive functions. This preregistered study investigated whether physical endurance as exemplified by cycling performance depends on internal language and internal visual experience. A sample of 50 physically active participants performed 12 cycling trials, each lasting one minute where they were required to cycle as fast as possible while remembering either a sequence of letters and numbers (verbal interference) or locations on a grid (nonverbal interference). We found that participants cycled a shorter distance in the verbal interference condition compared with the no-interference (p < .001) and the visuospatial inference conditions (nonsignificant: p = .10). Further, participants who reported that self-talk usually helps their sports performance were more negatively affected by verbal interference. Our study comprises a first attempt at using the dual-task method to investigate the causal role of self-talk in physical performance.