Perceptual-cognitive differences between university hockey players and non-hockey players

Athletes exhibit exceptional fitness levels and cognitive abilities in practice and competition. A large body of work has demonstrated that expert athletes perform better than novices and non-athletes on sport-specific tasks, but the transfer of sports training to more general laboratory-based measures of perception and cognition is less clear. A number of studies have explored the relationship between sports expertise and perceptual-cognitive abilities, but some findings are contradictory, and there is a lack of clarity of effects associated with various facets of attention. This study aimed to assess whether university-level athletes demonstrate superior performance across a broad range of visual-attentional skills compared to non-athletes, while controlling for potential motivational differences between the groups. We administered a comprehensive battery of computer-based visual tasks to university hockey players and non-athlete student controls. Our tasks assessed selective attention (Eriksen Flanker Task), sustained dynamic attention (Multiple-Object Tracking), spatial distribution of attention (Useful Field of View), and basic perception (Line Comparison). We found that, compared to controls, the hockey players demonstrated enhanced performance in measures of selective attention and in identifying transient stimuli at central fixation, even after controlling for potential group differences in motivation and strategy. Our results provide novel insight into sport-specific and sport-general cognitive enhancements associated with competitive sport training and have implications for generalised enhancements in cognitive performance.