Professional athletes have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning complex and neutral dynamic visual scenes

Evidence suggests that an athlete’s sports-related perceptual-cognitive expertise is a crucial element of top-level competitive sports. When directly assessing whether such experience-related abilities correspond to fundamental and non-specific cognitive laboratory measures such as processing speed and attention, studies have shown moderate effects leading to the conclusion that their special abilities are context-specific. We trained 308 observers on a complex dynamic visual scene task void of context and motor control requirements3 and demonstrate that professionals as a group dramatically differ from high-level amateur athletes, who dramatically differ from non-athlete university students in their capacity to learn such stimuli. This demonstrates that a distinguishing factor explaining the capacities of professional athletes is their ability to learn how to process complex dynamic visual scenes. This gives us an insight as to what is so special about the elite athletes’ mental abilities, which allows them to express great prowess in action.

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