Chronic participation in externally paced, but not self-paced sports is associated with the modulation of domain-general cognition

Abstract

The present study investigated the role of chronic sport participation in the modulation of vigilance and inhibitory control. We also aimed to disentangle the relative contribution of different types of sport expertise and sport-related fitness to the exercise-cognition relationship. Three groups of young adults differing in their chronic sport expertise (externally-paced sports, n = 22, self-paced sports, n = 22, non-athletes, n = 22) took part in the study. Participants completed a cardiovascular fitness test, a hand-eye coordination test and two different types of vigilance tasks: (1) Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) and (2) Oddball Task, which were designed to gain insight into the cognitive processes involved in sustaining attention over time and allocating selective attention by exerting inhibitory control, respectively. No differences were found in PVT performance between the two athlete groups and between self-paced sports athletes and non-athletes, whereas athletes from externally-paced sports outperformed non-athletes. Crucially, athletes from externally-paced sports also differed from those of self-paced sports and non-athletes in the Oddball task, showing less omission and commission errors. The sport expertise effect was independent of participant’s cardiovascular fitness while hand-eye coordination modulated vigilance and inhibitory control performance. Our findings add novel empirical evidence to the role of expertise in cognitively demanding sports as an important factor in the relationship between exercise and cognition.

Keywords:

• Cognition
• aerobic fitness
• neuroscience
• psychology
• team sports

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Ministerio de Educación y Cultura (grant number Predoctoral grant FPU13-05605) and Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (PSI2013-46385 and PSI2017-84926-P).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rafael Ballester http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1602-6809

Francesc Llorens http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3313-709X

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Educación y Cultura [grant number Predoctoral grant (FPU13-05605)]; Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad [grant number PSI2017-84926-P].