Exposing an “Intangible” Cognitive Skill Among Collegiate Football Players: III. Enhanced Reaction Control to Motion

Abstract

Football is played in a dynamic, often unpredictable, visual environment in which players are challenged to process and respond with speed and flexibility to critical incoming stimulus events. To meet this challenge, we hypothesize that football players possess, in conjunction with their extraordinary physical skills, exceptionally proficient executive cognitive control systems that optimize response execution. It is particularly important for these systems to be proficient at coordinating directional reaction and counter-reaction decisions to the very rapid lateral movements routinely made by their opponents during a game. Despite the importance of this executive skill to successful on-field performance, it has not been studied in football players. To fill this void, we compared the performances of Division I college football players (n = 525) and their non-athlete age counterparts (n = 40) in a motion-based stimulus-response compatibility task that assessed their proficiency at executing either compatible (in the same direction) or incompatible (in the opposite direction) lateralized reactions to a target's lateral motion. We added an element of decision uncertainty and complexity by giving them either sufficient or insufficient time to preload the response decision rule (i.e., compatible vs. incompatible) prior to the target setting in motion. Overall, football players were significantly faster than non-athlete controls in their choice reactions to a target's lateral motion. The reactions of all participants slowed when issuing incompatible counter-reactions to a target's lateral motion. For football players, this cost was reduced substantially compared to controls when given insufficient time to preload the decision rule, indicating that they exerted more efficient executive control over their reactions and counter-reactions when faced with decision uncertainty at the onset of stimulus motion. We consider putative sources of their advantage in reacting to a target's lateral motion and discuss how these findings advance the hypothesis that football players utilize highly-proficient executive control systems to overcome processing conflicts during motor performance.

The arrow of time: Advancing insights into action control from the arrow version of the Eriksen flanker task

“…Delays or hesitations in reaction decisions (on the order of a few tens of milliseconds) produced by processing conflicts can have significant consequences, such as missed play opportunities, poorly timed actions, and blown assignments. In a series of investigations, Bashore and colleagues (Bashore et al, 2018 ; Wylie et al, 2019 ; Wylie et al, 2018 ) provided converging support to the hypothesis that highly talented, elite-level football players possess superior executive cognitive control skills. In the first of this series (Wylie et al, 2018 ), they compared 283 top National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I football players and nonathlete age controls on performance of the arrows flanker task.…”

Subtle impairments of perceptual-motor function and well-being are detectable among military cadets and college athletes with self-reported history of concussion

“…Moving visual stimuli activate the hV5/MT + motion sensitive area of the brain that is involved in the neural process of generating rapid motor responses ( 69 – 71 ). Horizontally moving circles that impose a cognitive demand (i.e., congruent vs. incongruent stimulus-response instructions) may provide a more perceptually challenging and ecologically valid representation of a real-world dynamic environment than the statically displayed stimuli that are typically used to assess neurocognitive status ( 72 ). Given the complexity of the central nervous system and individual variations in its architecture, some amount of within-subject dispersion among different types of stimuli and corresponding responses generated by different body parts is not surprising ( 73 ).…”

“…Although the 12-Metric Dispersion value for neck, upper extremity, and lower extremity responses provided the best VR indicator of HxC, test results that do not require standardization permit immediate post-test assessment of an individual's performance. Only one prior study has utilized a similar moving circle paradigm for assessment of the ability to cognitively suppress execution of incorrect responses to stimuli that elicit a processing conflict, which demonstrated a lesser Conflict Effect for football players compared to non-athletes ( 72 ). Expected associations of HxC with both Conflict Effect and Rate Correct per Second were evident, but lack of a meaningful correlation between Conflict Effect and Rate Correct per Second suggests that they represent the output of different neural processes.…”