COGNITION IN ELITE FOOTBALLERS PART 8

In part 8 of this monster study, we stay in stage 2 and look at the part executive functions play in elite footballers.

• Executive functions is where action selection is non-conscious where its outcome can be influenced by conscious intentions and other cognitive control processes adding flexibility to an already automatically driven behavior which is important for dynamic/complex sports
• Conscious control leaves room for coordination between players in the form of strategies/tactics from coaches but there is trade off between flexibility offered by cognitive control and the speed gained by automatic reactions.
• Core executive functions belong to 3 main categories x mental shifting, information updating and inhibitory control
• Information updating is closely related to working memory as described in stage 1
• Higher-level executive functions combine several core processes for the handling of complex tasks (planning reasoning, creative problem solving) and there is some evidence that executive functions are important in sports as athletes tend to outperform non-athletes on tests of inhibition/problem solving and athletes from strategic sports score higher on response conflict tasks than non-strategic athletes
• Executive control functions are relevant to stage 2 processes such as orienting behavior but as mentioned in stage 1, it’s not directly addressed in literature
• Executive functions are typically investigated by standard cognitive tests such as trail making (mental shifting), stop signal and stroop tasks (response inhibition) and design fluency (higher level executive processes) where skilled players score better than average on these tests and those executive scores correlate to performance
• In skilled v lesser skilled v non athletes, both skilled groups scored higher than non athletes and high skilled far higher than lower skilled + there was a high correlation between design fluency scores and goal/assist stats 2 season’s later
• High level executive functions are related to the ability to adaptively read the game
• Creativity is another flexible action selection which are solutions that are novel and appropriate across different situational contexts and is related to a higher degree of visual exploration as seen with flexible response generation in stage 2, which is related to more elaborate information gathering processes in stage 1 which tend to activate a single response option
• High correlation between tests of executive function/visual functions pointing to a connection of the 2 in cognitive domains of sport
• Creativity is also related to training/game playing policies in different clubs and could result from both conscious choices of playing attitude as well as automatic, over-learned processes established by training regimes emphasising response flexibility
• Executive functions are highly relevant for skilled performance due to response flexibility with performance on higher level executive tests related to match performance + creativity is important to response flexibility and is related to elaborate exploration in stage 1