Previous studies on athletes’ cognitive functions have reported superior performance on tasks measuring attention and sensorimotor abilities. However, how types of sports training shapes cognitive profile remains to be further explored. In this study, we recruited elite athletes specialized in badminton (N = 35, female = 12) and volleyball (N = 29, female = 13), as well as healthy adult controls (N = 27, female = 17) who had not receive any regular sports training. All participants completed cognitive assessments on spatial attention, sensory memory, cognitive flexibility, motor inhibition, and the attention networks. The results showed that athletes generally showed superior performance on selective cognitive domains compared to healthy controls. Specifically, compared to the healthy control, volleyball players showed superior on iconic memory, inhibitory control of action, and attentional alerting, whereas badminton players showed advantages on iconic memory and basic processing speed. Overall, volleyball players outperformed badminton players on those tasks require stimulus-driven visual attention and motor inhibition, likely due to different training modalities and characteristics of specialty that involves even more complex cognitive processes. To conclude, our findings suggest cognitive plasticity may drive by sports training in team/individual sports expertise, manifesting cognitive profile in sport expertise with distinct training modalities.

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The event-related brain potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate the neural mechanism of non-target language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with a mixed list of Chinese and English words and required to make conceptual decisions for words in one language and ignore words in the other non-target language. Regardless of whether the nontarget word was in Chinese or English, the ERPs they elicited were modulated by word frequency, suggesting that their meaning had been accessed. The N400 peak was delayed in the English as the non-target language condition, probably because participants were less proficient in English. The results suggest that the non-target language can be processed during conceptual tasks with participants' proficiency in this language being a critical factor.