The study, of 87 top-ranked Brazilian volleyball players (some of them medalists in the Beijing and London Olympics) and 67 of their nonathletic contemporaries, also found that being an athlete minimizes the performance differences that normally occur between women and men<\/strong>. Female athletes, the researchers found, were more like their male peers in the speed of their mental calculations and reaction times, while nonathletic females performed the same tasks more slowly than their male counterparts.<\/p>\n The study appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we have learned that athletes are different from us in some ways,\u201d said University of Illinois psychology professor and Beckman Institute director Arthur Kramer, who led the study with graduate student Heloisa Alves.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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<\/strong>, \u201c Kramer said. \u201cThey were also able to activate, to pick up information from a glance and to switch between tasks more quickly than nonathletes. I would say these were modest differences, but they were interesting differences nonetheless.\u201d<\/p>\n Overall, the athletes were faster at memory tests and tasks that required them to switch between tasks. They were quicker to notice things in their peripheral vision and to detect subtle changes in a scene<\/strong>. And in general, they were better able to accomplish tasks while ignoring confusing or irrelevant information.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most interesting discovery was that female athletes had significant cognitive advantages over their nonathletic counterparts<\/strong>, Kramer said, advantages that minimized the subtle speed differences between them and the men. The female athletes were faster than their nonathletic peers at detecting changes in a scene and could more quickly pick out relevant details from a distracting background. Their performance on these and the other tasks was on par with the male athletes, whereas nonathletic males consistently outperformed their female peers.<\/p>\n Nonathletes excelled at only one of the cognitive tests the researchers administered<\/strong>. In this test, called the stopping task, participants were asked to type a \u201cZ\u201d or \u201c\/\u201d key as soon as they saw it on a computer screen \u2013 unless they heard a tone shortly after the character appeared, in which case they were told to refrain from responding. Nonathletes tended to be faster in cases where the tone never sounded, while athletes were better at inhibiting their responses after hearing a tone.<\/p>\n The ability to inhibit a response is one marker of what brain researchers call \u201cexecutive function,\u201d the capacity to control, plan and regulate one\u2019s behavior, Kramer said. While it has obvious advantages in sport, the ability to quickly inhibit an action also is useful in daily life, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cOne way to think about it is you\u2019re in your car and you\u2019re ready to start off at a light and you catch in your side vision a car or a bicyclist that you didn\u2019t see a second ago<\/strong>,\u201d he said. Being able to stop after having decided to go can be a lifesaver in that situation.<\/p>\n \u201cSo both facilitating and inhibiting behavior is important,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Kramer said the athletes\u2019 slower performance on this one task might be the result of a strategic decision they had made to wait and see if the tone sounded before they committed to pressing a key<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cMy bet is that the athletes were just learning to read the task a little better,\u201d he said. \u201cSo if I\u2019m a little slower in going, I\u2019ll be a little better at stopping if I need to.\u201d<\/p>\n All in all, the new findings add to the evidence that those who spend years training on specific physical tasks tend to also have enhanced cognitive abilities<\/strong>, Kramer said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur understanding is imperfect because we don\u2019t know whether these abilities in the athletes were \u2018born\u2019 or \u2018made,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cPerhaps people gravitate to these sports because they\u2019re good at both. Or perhaps it\u2019s the training that enhances their cognitive abilities as well as their physical ones<\/strong>. My intuition is that it\u2019s a little bit of both.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the University of Illinois press release: New research suggests that elite athletes \u2013 Olympic medalists in volleyball, for example \u2013 perform better than the rest of us in yet… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[42,18,12,284],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11625"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11699,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625\/revisions\/11699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"DSI](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/42079_web.jpg\")
<\/a>New research suggests that elite athletes \u2013 Olympic medalists in volleyball, for example \u2013 perform better than the rest of us in yet another way. These athletes excel not only in their sport of choice but also in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information<\/strong> \u2013 cognitive abilities that are important on and off the court.<\/p>\n