Monkeys Can 'Choke' Under Pressure Too, Study Finds

Some people's performance tends to get affected when they are pressured, but do animals experience it, too? A team of researchers has found that even monkeys can "choke" under pressure.

People have the tendency to have "striking performance deficits" when pressured, the researchers of a recent study published in Scientific Reports noted. In more common terms, this is known as "choking under pressure."

This doesn't happen to everyone, however, as some individuals experience the opposite and end up thriving or performing better when they're under pressure.

According to the researchers, the stress responses linked to either choking or thriving are "well-conserved" in primates, but whether other primates can actually experience the same effects when they're under pressure is "unknown."

"To address this, we trained capuchin monkeys on a computer game that had clearly denoted high- and low-pressure trials, then tested them on trials with the same signals of high pressure, but no difference in task difficulty," the researchers wrote.

Basically, the monkeys were trained to associate a blue background with harder, high-pressure trials and better rewards. On the other hand, a white background was linked to normal, low-pressure tasks with regular rewards. During the testing, however, they kept the same pressure cues for the harder trials but equalized the difficulty levels.

The researchers found that the monkeys' individual responses to the trials actually varied when the difficulty difference was removed, Georgia State University noted in a news release. Some of the monkeys performed better while others did worse. The animals also improved as they gained more experience performing under pressure.

The researchers also found that higher levels of the stress biomarker, cortisol, was linked to lower performance in high-pressure trials compared to the lower-pressure trials.

"Our results suggest that, like humans, there is individual variation in how capuchins perform on a cognitive task during high-pressure situations, with some monkeys tending to choke and others to thrive," the researchers wrote.

"There are several different explanations for why humans might 'choke' or 'thrive' under pressure, but all of these explanations have traditionally considered this sensitivity to pressure to be a human-specific trait," Georgia State Ph.D. candidate Meg Sosnowski, the study's lead author, said in the news release.

However, the results of their study show that choking or thriving under pressure may not just be because of factors that are specific to humans. Instead, it may be an "evolutionarily conserved" stress response.

According to the researchers, understanding these effects of pressure in other species may also help us predict and even ease them in humans.