Cognitive function and sport: evaluation of the cognitive skills that relate to tennis success

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine the relation between different cognitive skills and athletic performance in tennis players. Specifically, I aimed to investigate attention (alerting, orienting, executive control), reaction speed and visual search capacity, in tennis players and controls. The study consisted of 36 participants (boys and girls), aged 14-16 years, where 18 children were tennis players and 18 were non-players. They were classified into two groups, based on their engagement in tennis. They carried out 3 computerized tasks, each assessing different cognitive skills. The Attention Network Test (ANT) assessed the three networks of attention, namely alerting, orienting, and executive control. The Whack-a-Mole task evaluated inhibitory control of attention, by measuring performance in a classic Go/No-Go task and tapping on response inhibition. The Visual Search task examined reaction time performance as well as visual search processes. A Virtual Reality task (Reaction Speed Task) was also administered to evaluate reaction time. A Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed an interaction between group and the VR task’s difficulty level, showing that although tennis players were faster than non-athletes at all task difficulty levels, the difference was larger at the easier level of 9 discs. Also, Independent Samples T-Tests showed that athletes exhibited lower reaction time to respond to targeted stimuli than non-athletes in the Whack-a-Mole task. Furthermore, the years of tennis experience was associated with the performance in the Whack-a-Mole task, the Reaction Speed task, and the Visual Search task (at set size 2). In addition, the frequency of tennis training was also correlated with the performance in the Whack-a-Mole task and in the Reaction Speed task. These findings support the idea that even from a young age athletes have more advanced cognitive skills than non-athletes.