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Recent studies demonstrated that athletes outperform ordinary people on cognitive tasks requiring processing speed and varied attention. The current study adopted a component skill approach to distinguish different types of athletes and compare their cognitive profiles. Functional MRI experiment is also conduct when participants are performing the attention network test to contrast among various groups of athletes and control to examine how they differ in the alerting (central cue – no cue), orienting (spatial cue - central cue), and conflict resolution (incongruent target – congruent target) components.
Athletes specialized in static sport (14 swimmers), interceptive sport (19 fencers), or strategic sport (15 basketball players) were recruited. Participants were assessed with a cognitive battery, which consists of tasks examining executive control (stop-signal task and task-switching task, memory (iconic memory task), and varied attention (change detection task). Between-group comparisons showed that basketball players had superior performance on inhibitory control and iconic memory. Overall, the trend of results implies that athletes had better attentional orienting to detect and utilize spatial cues and visual sensory memory than the non-athletes control group. Furthermore, the multi-group principal component analysis on the correlation matrix among task performance of each group indicated the common cognitive structure of visuospatial attention, visual sensory memory, and sensorimotor speed, while there was a unique inhibitory component in the basketball players.
The task-related FMRI findings of the attentional network in all participants regardless of groups were consistent with the previous studies on distinct neural networks associated with each of the three attention components. Alerting was associated with increased left temporal lobe activation while orienting contrast activated parietal sites and bilateral prefrontal region. Executive control activated cingulate gyrus and prefrontal regions.
As for the FMRI results of contrasting the attentional network components among groups, fencers showed significantly stronger functional activations than the other groups in the left postcentral gyrus in the contrast of the alerting component, and in the left premotor cortex during executive control of attention when compared with others. These findings indicate that fencers involved somatosensory processing in maintaining alertness and monitoring intrinsic control of visual attention. In addition, the swimmers showed stronger activation than the basketball players and the fencers in left middle occipital gyrus for conflict resolution component, which reflects that swimmer recruit more resources of visual processing to resolving the conflict.
To conclude, intensive physical training in sports experiences requiring different component skills could render the idiosyncratic cognitive structure in different types of athletes, in addition to the common cognitive components shared by all participants. Unique patterns of BOLD signal changes associated with the alerting and conflict resolution components of ANT can be observed in athletes specialized in interceptive and static sports skills, which is consistent with the idea that different sets of mental demands are required by distinct types of sports. | en_US |