The role of domain-specific and domain-general cognitive functions and skills in sports performance: A meta-analysis.

Abstract

Cognition plays a key role in sports performance. This meta-analytic review synthesizes research that examined the relationship between cognitive functions, skills, and sports performance. We identified literature by searching Cochrane Library, APA PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science. We included studies conducted on competitive athletes, assessed cognitive prerequisites, and included performance measures related to the sport. Of the 9,433 screened records, 136 reports were included, containing 142 studies, 1,227 effect sizes, and 8,860 participants. Only 11 studies used a prospective study design. The risk of bias was assessed using the Risk of Bias Assessment Tool for Nonrandomized Studies. The multilevel meta-analysis showed a medium effect size for the overall difference in cognitive functions and skills, with higher skilled athletes scoring better than lower skilled athletes (Hedges’ g = 0.59, 95% CI [0.49, 0.69]). The moderator analysis showed larger effect size for tests of cognitive decision-making skills (g = 0.77, 95% CI [0.6, 0.94]) compared to basic (g = 0.39, 95% CI [0.21, 0.56]) and higher cognitive functions (g = 0.44, 95% CI [0.26, 0.62]), as well as larger effect for sport-specific task stimuli compared to general ones. We report that higher skilled athletes perform better on cognitive function tests than lower skilled athletes. There was insufficient evidence to determine whether cognitive functions and skills can predict future sport performance. We found no evidence to support claims that tests of general cognitive functions, such as executive functioning, should be used by practitioners for talent identification or player selection.

A developmental outlook on the role of cognition and emotions in youth volleyball and artistic gymnastics

“…Surprisingly, developmental research has neglected the examination of sports performance [see Kalén et al (2021) ], while sport is an important area for developmental psychology. This research, feeding into a rather small research line ( Vestberg et al, 2012 , 2017 ; Verburgh et al, 2014b ; Huijgen et al, 2015 ; Ishihara et al, 2018 ) provides insights into the relation between cognition, emotions, and performance in youth sport, from a developmental perspective and with an ecological approach to the study of sports performance.…”

“…In general, these studies show the superiority of athletes from interceptive sports (i.e., sports that require coordination between the athletes’ body and an object in the environment) in several cognitive paradigms, both under a sport-specific context [for a meta-analysis, see Mann et al (2007) ] and on general laboratory-based tasks ( Voss et al, 2010 ; Wang et al, 2013 ). Although the impact of sport in enhancing cognitive abilities is acknowledged, the role of cognition in sports performance is still relatively under-researched, and mainly studied with adult athletes [see Kalén et al (2021) for a recent meta-analysis].…”

Gritting One’s way to success – Grit explains skill in elite youth soccer players beyond (deliberate) practice

“…These non-motor tests feature domain-specific situations which require correct anticipations and regularly correlate highly with objective and subjective measures of skill (Dugdale et al, 2020;Sieghartsleitner et al, 2019). A recent meta-analysis indicates that these domain-specific tests of decision making are by far the best tool among other cognitive tests in differentiating between more and less skilled athletes (Kalén et al, 2021). While they are no perfect measure of skill, the perceptual-cognitive soccer abilities are considered as a proxy for soccer skill in this study.…”

On religious practices as multiscale active inference: Certainties emerging from recurrent interactions within and across individuals and groups

“…Accordingly, researchers argue that cognitive neuroscience has undergone a Kuhnian shift away from the Modularity of the Mind (mostly bottom-up) toward predictive accounts of cognition that emphasise and formalise recursive relationships in which the relative dominance of bottom-up and top-down influences varies dynamically (Asprem, 2019). Predictive accounts of cognition have become predominant as explanations of cognitive processes based on a large amount of scientific evidence for the role of domain-general over domain-specific processing, disputing the information encapsulation supposed by the Modularity of the Mind (Kalén et al 2021, Nair et al 2021Mononen, Gerlach et al 2022;Niemivirta and Korhonen, 2022;Saito et al 2022). Another scientific finding challenging the Modularity of the Mind framework is the role of top-down effects on lower-level cognition.…”