Attention and concentration are crucial abilities that affect the decision-making of athletes; e.g. during a soccer action, an athlete has to divide attention on the field (teammates, opponents, ball), to use selective attention (which player to give the ball to) and to focus attention (staring at the net to score). To this purpose, many benefits may arise from the high-level NeuroTracker conditioning technique as it stimulates active processing of dynamic visual information and trains perceptual-cognitive functions of athletes. In particular, it targets selective, dynamic and sustained attention, as well as working memory.

What Was Studied

23 university soccer players participated in the study and were randomly allocated to three different groups. The experimental group performed 30 NeuroTracker Core sessions over a 5 week period, the active control group performed 30 3D soccer videos sessions over a 5 week period, and the passive control group had no particular training activity over a 5 week period. Players’ decision-making was evaluated during standardized small sided games before and after the training period. Decision-making of soccer players was objectively analysed through video recordings of the small sided games by a soccer coach blinded to the experimental protocol and using a standardized coding criteria. Subjective decision-making accuracy was directly evaluated from players’ confidence levels in decision-making promptly after the games using a Visual Analog Scale (Sport Performance Scale).

What Was Found

Only the NeuroTracker trained group showed an increase (15%) in passing decision making on the field after the training. Moreover, players’ subjective decision-making assessment was quantitatively proportional to the improvement in decision-making accuracy rated during video analysis for the NeuroTracker trained group.

Takeaways

These results seem to demonstrate that passing decision-making accuracy improvement in the trained group represents a meaningful training effect. For the first time, this study demonstrates a perceptual-cognitive transfer from the laboratory to the field following a non-sport specific perceptual-cognitive training program.

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Reference: Thomas Romeas et al. ‘3D-Multiple Object Tracking training task improves passing decision-making accuracy in soccer players’ Psychology of Sport & Exercise, Vol. 22, 1-9, 2016

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