These are the ten sources from the annotated bibliography I turned in for AP Research on September 30, 2026, with the annotations as I wrote them. They cover where players aim their serves and why, how momentum and earlier errors carry over from point to point, and what attention and anxiety research says about choking under pressure.
01 — Stated, Realized, and Optimal Aiming Strategies for the Tennis Serve
Sandholtz, N., Hanson, R., Hager, R., Kovalchik, S., & Fellingham, G. (2026). Stated, Realized, and Optimal Aiming Strategies for the Tennis Serve: Experimental Evidence from Collegiate Athletes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.28500.
This article focuses on how execution error affects the optimal place to aim for competitive tennis players by researching the men’s tennis team at Brigham Young University. The authors believe that the optimal serving location is dependent on each individual’s execution error, or how much their serve locations vary from where they aim. The authors stated that it is difficult to use public match-play data to determine execution error, as one can’t tell where the player is aiming. To test this, the researchers compared players’ stated aim with where they actually hit during a practice session. The research found that the player’s stated aims were much more aggressive and risky than optimal, but their actual serve locations were safer and closer to the optimal spot, although every player said that their target would not change. This conclusion is of interest to me because it shows how tennis players’ intentions and thoughts differ from their actual results.
02 — Neuroimaging and perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport
Decouto, B. S., Bilalic, M., & Williams, A. M. (2024). Neuroimaging and perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport: A narrative review of research and future directions. Neuropsychologia, 205, 1-12. Article 109032. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.109032
This article focuses on how professional athletes detect patterns and interpret information for anticipation, which the authors call “perceptual-cognitive expertise”. The authors believe that brain research on sport expertise has focused “almost exclusively on biological motion processing (i.e., action observation network), leaving gaps in knowledge about the neural mechanisms underlying other frequently cited perceptual-cognitive skills, such as pattern recognition, the use of contextual priors, and global processing”. The authors use a narrative review of fMRI and EEG studies in sport, “a domain where individuals possess highly specialized perceptual-cognitive skills (i.e., expertise) that enable successful performance in dynamic environments”. The authors claim that athletes predict through watching the opponent’s body movements, which triggers their prefrontal, motor, and parietal cortexes more than it triggers a novice. Furthermore, when the ball’s path isn’t visible, the experts rely on frontal and premotor areas to read body cues, while the parietal areas take over when the ball is visible. For example, in tennis, professionals read information from the whole body early in the shot, but switch to a smaller, more local view of just the arm and the racquet directly before the ball is hit. The authors’ findings are of interest to me in my research because they are able to identify how the way in which athletes perceive and predict their surroundings changes at different points.
03 — Disequilibrium play in tennis
Anderson, A., Rosen, J., Rust, J., & Wong, K. P. (2025). Disequilibrium play in tennis. Journal of Political Economy, 133(1), 190-251.
This article focuses on the way in which tennis players decide where they serve at different times. The authors believe that professional tennis players do not always play using “Nash equilibrium” strategies, in which players optimize their serving location so that every spot has an equal win-rate, maximizing unpredictability. While previous research had found that professional win rates were about equal across serve directions, Anderson et al. found that they weren’t by looking at three directions instead of two and measuring the whole service game instead of single points. Furthermore, they found a “muscle memory” effect in which the location of the past two serves would influence the same location more likely on the next one. They then assert that if professional players used the Nash equilibrium, their serve win rates would increase drastically. For example, they simulated that it might raise Nadal’s chance of holding serve against Djokovic from 71% to 91.5%. This article is very current, as it was published last year. It is relevant to my research because it serves as evidence that players behave in suboptimal ways due to cognitive biases. The accuracy of this article is strong, as it was peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Political Economy. Although their data was crowd sourced, this limitation was cited in the study, and the authors used objective methods to come to their conclusions in general. The researchers have strong authority, with three authors representing Georgetown University. The purpose of the study, to examine Nash equilibrium tendencies in tennis, is unbiased, and the individual authors do not have any incentives to sway the conclusions in any direction.
04 — Strategic and Psychological Momentum in Professional Tennis
Depken, C. A., Gandar, J., & Shapiro, D. (2020). Strategic and Psychological Momentum in Professional Tennis. Available at SSRN 3659495.
This article focuses on how psychological momentum affects player performance in best-of-three sets. The authors classify momentum as either strategic momentum or psychological momentum. In a best-of-three scenario, a player who has won the first set experiences strategic momentum because they have a bigger reward for winning the next set compared to the person who is losing (winning the match vs. evening the score). This incentivizes the person who is winning to put forth more effort. However, if the other player wins the second set and evens the score, neither player experiences any strategic momentum, as they both have equal rewards for winning the next set. Alternatively, psychological momentum is the idea that “success breeds success”, where “winning a round boosts the player’s confidence and makes the player more likely to win the next round, holding abilities constant”. In the best-of-three scenario, the player that won the second set would have psychological momentum and would be more likely to win the third set. The authors use a mathematical model of a fully rational best-of-three match, 67,730 ATP and WTA matches from 2002 to 2020, and betting odds to measure each player's ability, to support their claim that both kinds of momentum affect who wins. The author’s conclusion is of interest to me in my research on how cognitive factors influence athletic performance because it demonstrates how the influence of psychological momentum can affect the outcome of a match.
05 — Psychological pressure and compounded errors during elite-level tennis
Harris, D. J., Vine, S. J., Eysenck, M. W., & Wilson, M. R. (2021). Psychological pressure and compounded errors during elite-level tennis. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 56, Article 101987. doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2021.101987
The focus of this article is the effects of high pressure scenarios and previous errors on the performance of professional tennis players. The authors believe that both an increase in the pressure index as well as an error on the preceding point can lead to a much higher chance for a performance error, such as a double fault or unforced error as examples of controllable mistakes. The authors use a retrospective analysis of more than 650,000 points across 12 Grand Slam tournaments across 2016-2019. The authors claim that these effects compound, and errors during higher pressure situations would lead to a further increased chance of a performance error on the next point, which was in line with the predictions of Attentional Control Theory: Sport (ACTS). Finally, the authors found that winning players were just as susceptible to pressure and prior errors as losing players. This is useful to my study because it shows how different pressure and different momentum situations may affect players’ performance.
06 — On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?
Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 130(4), 701.
The focus of this article is what happens in the brain when professional athletes “choke”, defined here as when a skilled performer does worse than expected in a high-stake moment. The authors believe in an “explicit monitoring” theory that explains this performance. They believe that choking happens because the players pay conscious attention to actions that usually run automatically. They tested this among golfers by offering money incentives for putts to compare control to high pressure scenarios. Additionally, the authors support this claim by showing that expert golfers were able to describe putting in general well but were less able to describe the specifics of their recent putts, demonstrating how their muscle memory takes over. Furthermore, practicing while being watched helped to prevent choking in competitive scenarios, while practicing with a distraction didn’t. This source is useful to me because it helps provide an example of the way in which pressure affects performance psychologically and it helps to demonstrate the mechanism behind choking.
07 — Choking under pressure: The neuropsychological mechanisms of incentive-induced performance decrements
Yu, R. (2015). Choking under pressure: The neuropsychological mechanisms of incentive-induced performance decrements. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9, Article 19. doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00019
This article focuses on the combination of three mechanisms in the brain on choking: distraction, in which the individual’s attention is pulled away from the task, explicit monitoring, in which the amount of conscious attention paid to step-by-step processes is raised, and over-arousal, when there is too much motivation in general. While these have all been past theories suggested by different papers, the authors believe that all of these ideas contribute together. The authors used a literature review of studies, such as one in which participants played Pac-Man, and errors increased when incentives were raised from $0.50 to $5.00. Using brain scanning, the authors also claim that activity tracking in reward-related areas tracked worse performance, while activity in prefrontal cortex areas was linked to better performance. Furthermore, they claim that “excessive motivation registered in the midbrain produces choking, whereas increased cortical control may reduce it," and that fear of losing a reward may matter as much as the hope of gaining one. While Beilock and Carr’s study only focused on the effects of explicit monitoring, this study discusses a combination of different factors. The author’s conclusion is of interest to me because it can help guide me on my research about why athletes’ behaviors change when they are in high reward scenarios, such as at the end of a match or in a late round of a tournament.
08 — Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory
Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336–353. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.336
This article focuses on the effects of anxiety on cognitive performance. The authors believe that anxiety weakens the brain’s goal-directed system, but strengthens the stimulus-driven system, which centers on whatever seems threatening or attention-grabbing, such as the individual’s own anxiety. The authors review several studies to generate their theory that anxiety blocks two functions in our brain: inhibition and shifting. The authors define inhibition as blocking out distractions or “focusing attention on relevant information and processes and inhibiting irrelevant ones”, and they define shifting as simply “switching attention between tasks”. Furthermore, they claim that anxiety does not lower effectiveness. Instead, it increases the effort needed to maintain the same effectiveness needed, making the action less efficient and meaning that performance only drops when they can no longer compensate for the higher levels of effort needed. The Attention Control Theory (ACT) and the Processing Efficiency Theory are the basis for Harris et al. 's claim about unforced errors, and offer a possible explanation for the psychological momentum referred to in Depken et al.’s paper. Their claim contrasts also provides an alternate lens on explicit monitoring through their views on anxiety limiting inhibition. This article will be useful to my paper as background for my other sources, as this article is referred to often in other papers, and Attention Control Theory is heavily related to my research topic.
09 — Anxiety and perceptual-motor performance
Nieuwenhuys, A., & Oudejans, R. R. D. (2012). Anxiety and perceptual-motor performance: Toward an integrated model of concepts, mechanisms, and processes. Psychological Research, 76(6), 747–759. doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0384-x
This article focuses on the way that anxiety affects perceptual-motor performance, which is when we perceive our surroundings, choose an action, and carry it out. The authors believe that both the Attention Control Theory (Eysenck et al.) and the execution focus models (Beilock and Carr) both are similar ideas stemming from distraction models. The authors claim “distraction models” argue that if attention is drawn towards task-irrelevant (threat-related) stimuli under anxiety, this should mean that less attention is available for movement execution.” Additionally, the authors provide explanations for the effects of anxiety at three levels: the attentional level (looking at threats instead of task-relevant information), the interpretational level (reading an unclear situation as threatening), and the behavioral level (tenser, less efficient muscles and a pull toward avoidance). This article also changes how my paper will view Beilock and Carr’s perspective on explicit monitoring, instead drawing it more in line with what Eysenck et al. claimed. The authors found that for more than 70 elite athletes, conscious attention to their own movements was only 4% of their thoughts under pressure, whereas their own worries accounted for 25%. They reasoned that Beilock’s explicit monitoring was really just a form of distraction, as explained in Attention Control Theory. However, they agree with Beilock’s idea that training under pressure can help to prevent a dip in performance under pressure in competitive situations. This may mean that I could use Beilock et al. as a counterargument for a different opinion on the effects of anxiety in my paper. This article is relatively current, being published in 2012. Although it is older than some of my other sources, there is likely no major change in the credibility of the article. The article will be very relevant to my paper as it connects several of my sources and provides a comprehensive description of several leading theories on attention. The information is likely to be accurate, as it is a literature review and not a new study, so it supports all claims with several different sources. The authority of this paper is strong because the authors are both involved in the Faculty of Human Movement Sciences at VU University Amsterdam. Furthermore, the paper was published in a Springer. The purpose of this study is to generate a theory about how anxiety affect attention. In summary, the paper generally has strong credibility.
10 — Do agents maximise? Risk taking on first and second serves in tennis
Ely, J., Gauriot, R., & Page, L. (2017). Do agents maximise? Risk taking on first and second serves in tennis. Journal of Economic Psychology, 63, 135–142. doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2017.02.006
This article focuses on the efficiency of professional tennis players’ risk-taking on both first and second serves. They focus on let serves, in which the server clipped the net on the first serve. Because it is relatively random whether the serve will go in and give another first serve or go out and force a second serve after a let, the authors used lets as a way to control for unwanted variability. The authors used 7,605 lets out of 478,000 serves tracked by Hawk-Eye ball tracking data from 2005 to 2009. They claim that other studies that do not use lets may be biased, as second serves only happen after a missed first serve, leading to more unfavorable conditions such as fatigue for second serves compared to first serves. By using four separate tests, they found that the amount of risk taken on both first and second serves was relatively optimal. This is interesting because it offers a new perspective on both Anderson and Sandholtz’s papers which focus on serve location. I can use this article to add complexity about how optimally tennis players serve when not under pressure. This article is relatively current, being published in 2017. However, the data was sourced from 2005-2009, and tennis has changed since then, which may affect the credibility of the source. It is relevant to my paper because it provides a new outlook on how efficient tennis players are with their serving patterns. The source seems to be accurate, as it includes frequent citations, cites the specific data set that it pulled the lets out of, and was peer-reviewed. The authority is also strong, as both authors are affiliated with universities in Australia and their work was published in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Finally, the purpose of this article does not seem biased, as their information is based on the data they tested from Hawk-Eye, and they maintain the same four criteria throughout the article.