Team sport expertise shows superior stimulus-driven visual attention and motor inhibition

Abstract

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.

The field of expertise modulates the time course of neural processes associated with inhibitory control in a sport decision-making task

“…Sport, given its dynamic nature, the ongoing interaction between different performers and the time constraints under which decisions must be made, represents an ideal vehicle to investigate the effects of long-term IC training in complex situations. Athletes practicing an open-skill sport (e.g., tennis, fencing, and soccer) requiring players to behave in a continuously changing environment 26 have recorded faster RT in Go/NoGo tasks 16 , 24 , 27 , as well as changes in brain structure and function within the IC network 16 , 19 , 26 , 28 – 31 compared to nonathletes. On the other hand, athletes practicing closed-skill sports (e.g., swimming, high jump, and ballet) requiring performance in a predictable and stable environment face only a few situations involving IC and exhibit lower performance on IC tasks compared to athletes practicing open-skill sports 26 .…”

The Multiple Object Avoidance (MOA) task measures attention for action: Evidence from driving and sport

“…Overney et al, (2008) found that not only did tennis players outperform non-athletes, but they outperformed triathletes too in measures of temporal processing. Similarly, Meng et al (2019) found that volleyball players performed better than badminton players on some tasks such as attentional alerting, whereas the badminton players performed better than volleyball players on measures such as processing speed. Future research might aim to investigate individual differences in visual attention function as measured by the MOA in further defined sporting categories in order to further our understanding of the attentional nature of the MOA.…”

The superior response speed of table tennis players is associated with proactive inhibitory control

“…Reactive inhibitory control refers to the ability to withdraw from already-planned actions when necessary, and is thought to be a bottom-up, late correction process triggered by external signals ( e.g ., braking when a pedestrian suddenly crosses the street) ( Aron, 2011 ; Aron, Robbins & Poldrack, 2004 , 2014 ; Braver, 2012 ; Hampshire & Sharp, 2015 ). Previous studies found that athletes, especially those in open skill sports, exhibited a heightened capacity for inhibitory control ( Huijgen et al, 2015 ; Jacobson & Matthaeus, 2014 ; Meng et al, 2019 ; Yamashiro et al, 2015 ); however, most of the studies looked at reactive rather than proactive inhibitory control ( Heppe & Zentgraf, 2019 ; Liao, Meng & Chen, 2017 ; Wang et al, 2013 ). Using a modified version of the stop-signal task, Brevers et al (2018) estimated proactive inhibitory control by increased go-signal RT as a function of increased stop-signal probability ( i.e ., a higher change in go-signal RTs per stop-signal probability unit indicated a better capacity for proactive inhibitory control) and reported that elite athletes exhibited superior proactive inhibitory control.…”