Arousal–Performance Curve: The Yerkes-Dodson Law

Sport psychology's best-known finding is that performance is not a straight line against effort or nerves — it is an inverted U. This simulator renders that relationship as a live 3D surface: one axis is physiological arousal, the other is task complexity, and the height of the surface is predicted performance under the Yerkes-Dodson law, sharpened by the Easterbrook cue-utilisation effect that narrows and shifts the optimal zone for harder tasks. Drag the arousal slider and watch a marker climb toward peak performance, overshoot into the choking zone, or run repeated noisy trials to see how much of a given outcome is signal versus nerve-driven scatter.