Human
Athletes Have a Mental Advantage: New Reasons to Throw a Ball
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Mar 19, 2013 12:27 PM EDT
Olympic athletes can perform amazing feats of physical prowess. Yet it turns out that their abilities don't always extend only to the physical. New research has shown that athletes also have a cognitive advantage, often outperforming their nonathletic peers. That might be a reason to get outside and throw a ball around.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, examined 87 top-ranked Brazilian volleyball players and 67 of their nonathletic peers. The researchers had the participants perform several tasks that tested the speed of their mental calculation and reaction times. After examining the results, the scientists noted some interesting discoveries.
When tested in mental calculation speed and reaction time, males will often outperform females. Yet researchers found that female athletes were more like their male peers in the speed of their calculations and reaction times. In contrast, nonathletic females who performed the same tasks were slower than their male counterparts.
"We found that athletes were generally able to inhibit behavior, to stop quickly when they had to, which is very important in sport and in daily life," said Arthur Kramer, who led the study, in a press release. "They were also able to activate, to pick up information from a glance and to switch between tasks more quickly than non-athletes. I would say these were modest differences, but they were interesting differences nonetheless."
In addition, the athletes were faster at memory tests and tasks that required them to switch between subjects. They were also quicker to notice things in their peripheral vision and detect subtle changes in a scene.
While the researchers were able to detect a difference between athletes and non-athletes, though, they weren't able to determine whether it was athletic training that caused athletes to perform better, or if they were merely born that way.
"Our understanding is imperfect because we don't know whether these abilities in the athletes were 'born' or 'made," Kramer said in a press release. "Perhaps people gravitate to these sports because they're good at both. Or perhaps it's the training that enhances their cognitive abilities as well as their physical ones. My intuition is that it's a little bit of both."
Whether it's nature or nurture, though, it couldn't hurt to throw around a ball every once in a while.
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First Posted: Mar 19, 2013 12:27 PM EDT
Olympic athletes can perform amazing feats of physical prowess. Yet it turns out that their abilities don't always extend only to the physical. New research has shown that athletes also have a cognitive advantage, often outperforming their nonathletic peers. That might be a reason to get outside and throw a ball around.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, examined 87 top-ranked Brazilian volleyball players and 67 of their nonathletic peers. The researchers had the participants perform several tasks that tested the speed of their mental calculation and reaction times. After examining the results, the scientists noted some interesting discoveries.
When tested in mental calculation speed and reaction time, males will often outperform females. Yet researchers found that female athletes were more like their male peers in the speed of their calculations and reaction times. In contrast, nonathletic females who performed the same tasks were slower than their male counterparts.
"We found that athletes were generally able to inhibit behavior, to stop quickly when they had to, which is very important in sport and in daily life," said Arthur Kramer, who led the study, in a press release. "They were also able to activate, to pick up information from a glance and to switch between tasks more quickly than non-athletes. I would say these were modest differences, but they were interesting differences nonetheless."
In addition, the athletes were faster at memory tests and tasks that required them to switch between subjects. They were also quicker to notice things in their peripheral vision and detect subtle changes in a scene.
While the researchers were able to detect a difference between athletes and non-athletes, though, they weren't able to determine whether it was athletic training that caused athletes to perform better, or if they were merely born that way.
"Our understanding is imperfect because we don't know whether these abilities in the athletes were 'born' or 'made," Kramer said in a press release. "Perhaps people gravitate to these sports because they're good at both. Or perhaps it's the training that enhances their cognitive abilities as well as their physical ones. My intuition is that it's a little bit of both."
Whether it's nature or nurture, though, it couldn't hurt to throw around a ball every once in a while.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone