Cognitive Mechanisms underlying sports performance of athletes engaged in strategic team sports

We examined the cognitive performance of athletes engaged in strategic team sports such as football and basketball, which place certain cognitive demands underlying the action execution relevant to the sport. A total of sixty participants including 20 athletes with at least 5 years of experience at National/State level with football, twenty with basketball and twenty non-athletes participated in the study. Measures of vigilance (continuous performance task), selective attention (spatial cuing task), visual search (feature and conjunction search task), attention networks (Attention network task), working memory (n-back task) and motion perception (apparent motion task) were employed. Sports persons performed better on measures of vigilance, visual search, selective attention (voluntary orienting), and motion perception as they are required to process multiple stimuli, engage in coordinated actions and execute complex actions. Compared to football players, basketball players performed better with respect to sustained alertness on vigilance task, attentional facilitation and disengagement of attention on the spatial cuing task; and faster target detection in conjunction search condition with larger number of distractors. In team sports like basketball, athletes are unable to predict the diverse environment and thus need to respond fast and dynamically to varying requirements related to movement sequences. Basketball and football players were comparable to non-athletes on the working memory task. Differences in working memory performance are expected only with a more demanding task. Football players showed better performance on motion perception task compared to basketball players by dynamically effectively varying the temporal distance between stimuli for a strong motion percept. which may account for their better ability to accurately recognize and judge the speed of motion, which may help them to accurately perceive other’s actions in order to prepare for their own course of action. Thus, different strategic team sports may also involve different cognitive mechanisms mediating sports performance. Future work needs to explore more about cognitive-perceptual expertise in athletes engaged in team sports as a function of training and experience using a longitudinal design.