Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Sports Performance of Athletes Engaged in Strategic Team Sports

Abstract

We examined the cognitive performance of athletes engaged in strategic team sports such as football and basketball with sixty participants including athletes with at least five years of experience at National/State level in football and basketball and non-athletes. Measures of vigilance (continuous performance task), selective attention (spatial cuing task), visual search (feature and conjunction search task), attention network task, working memory (n-back task) and motion perception (apparent motion task) were employed. Athletes outperformed non- athletes on measures of vigilance, visual search, selective attention, and motion perception as they need to process multiple stimuli and engage in coordinated actions. Compared to football players, basketball players performed better with respect to vigilance, attentional facilitation and shifting; and faster target detection in conjunction search task with higher set-size. This is explained in terms of the need to assess the diverse environment and dynamically respond to the requirements related to movement sequences. Basketball and football players were comparable to non-athletes on the working memory task. Football players showed better performance on motion perception task compared to basketball players by effectively varying the temporal distance between stimuli for a strong motion percept, which may account for their ability to judge the speed of motion helping them to accurately perceive other’s actions to prepare for their own action. Thus, different strategic team sports may involve different cognitive skills mediating sports performance. Future work needs to explore more about sport- specific cognitive-perceptual expertise in athletes engaged in team sports as a function of training and experience using a longitudinal design.