In 2009, elite swimming introduced polyurethane "supersuits," which artificially enhanced performances and facilitated 43 world records at the World Championships, before being prohibited from 2010. This transient, artificial improvement spike created a natural experiment to examine the effect of "impossible" targets on subsequent performances. Analyses revealed that swimming speeds at global championships in the postsupersuit period (2011-2017) were substantially faster than predicted from the presupersuit period (2000-2007). These results suggest that the transient, artificially enhanced performances of the supersuit era recalibrated targets upward-acting as goals-and improved subsequent performances beyond previous trajectories (d = 0.64; 0.70%). Contributing to psychological goal-setting theory, the positive relationship between the size of the transient, artificial improvement (i.e., goal difficulty) and subsequent performance was curvilinear, increasing at a decreasing rate before improvements plateaued. Overall, the research demonstrates the potential for elite athletes to exceed perceived human limits after expectations have been recalibrated upward.

中文翻译：

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瞥见不可能：人工增强的目标如何提高精英的表现。

2009 年，精英游泳队引入了聚氨酯“超级泳装”，它人为地提高了表现，并在世界锦标赛上创造了 43 项世界纪录，然后在 2010 年被禁止。这种短暂的、人为的改进峰值创造了一个自然实验来检查“不可能”目标的效果在随后的表演中。分析表明，在超级赛后时期（2011-2017 年）全球锦标赛的游泳速度大大快于超赛前时期（2000-2007 年）的预测。这些结果表明，超级服时代的瞬态、人为增强的性能重新校准了目标，将目标向上作为目标，并提高了后续性能，使其超出了先前的轨迹（d = 0.64；0.70%）。有助于心理目标设定理论，暂时的、人为的改进（即目标难度）和随后的表现之间的正相关关系是曲线的，在改进达到稳定之前以递减的速度增加。总体而言，该研究表明，在重新调整期望值后，精英运动员有可能超越人类感知的极限。