Objective
The purpose of this study was to investigate the attentional networks function characteristics of interceptive and strategic sports athletes from open-skill sports.
Methods
We used a revised lateralized attention network task to measure attentional networks efficiency and activation related to flanker conflict effects, alerting effects, and orienting effects changes on the right frontoparietal network using functional near-infrared spectroscopy in 20 strategic sports athletes, 20 interceptive sports athletes, and 22 college students.
Results
The interceptive sports athletes had the fastest overall reaction time. Strategic sports athletes had the highest accuracy and smallest flanker conflict effect on accuracy. Compared with non-athletes, strategic sports athletes had a higher alerting effect, validity effect, and disengaging effect on reaction time; the disengaging effect was particularly higher than that in the interceptive sports athletes. This was accompanied by higher activity in the right frontoparietal network.
Conclusions
The open-skill athletes demonstrate significantly more efficient attentional function compared to non-athletes. Athletes from interceptive sports demonstrated increased speed when solving conflict, while those from strategic sports demonstrated higher accuracy. In addition, top-down control appears to play an important role in strategic sports athletes making a cautious decision. This can be attributed to the right frontoparietal network.
Vigilance, or sustained attention, tasks require observers to attend to information over a prolonged period of time. One individual difference that may be associated with sustained attention performance is achievement motivation, given recent findings in the literature that indicate a relationship between human motivation and attention. Fifty-nine participants were randomly assigned to either a cognitive or sensory vigilance task. The present study indicated that individuals high in achievement motivation detected more critical signals and made fewer false alarms in the cognitive vigilance task. Participants high in achievement motivation in the cognitive condition also demonstrated some of the highest distress and worry scores post-task. Implications for sustained attention tasks are discussed.
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