How Perception Can Boost Sports Performance\\

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about perception and sports performance. What's interesting to me particularly, is that they make some claims that counter arguments I've made on this board.

Namely:
“We suspect that a bigger [perceived] target makes people feel more confident in their ability” to hit it, she says. And greater confidence typically results in better performance. She and her colleagues did not assess confidence levels in this experiment, she says, though they plan to do so in follow-up work.
Now, I think they seem to be making a couple of assumptions that aren't supported by data:
1) "hot streaks" are not random events
2) a correlation between confidence and success implies that confidence creates success (wrt to shooting/kicking)

Regardless, the paper is interesting.