I Can See Clearly Now! Exploring the Interplay Between Sport Modality and Visual Search Skill, Visual Working Memory and Reasoning.

The ability to select and recall information is an essential cognitive function relevant to roughly every situation in our daily lives (Brand & Schiebener, 2013). The present investigation sought to further understanding of the influence of sport modality (i.e., open- and closed-skill sports) on different aspects of cognitive function such as visual search ability, visual working memory, and reasoning. Given the several cognitive demands imposed by open- and closed-skill sports, it appears reasonable to hypothesize that cognitive function may vary as a function of sport modality (Gu et al., 2019). Thirty-seven open-skill athletes (Mage = 27.30, SD =7.49 years), 32 closed-skill athletes (Mage = 29.97, SD = 9.73 years) and 26 non- athletes (Mage = 29.04, SD = 8.25 years) were recruited. Open-skill athletes came from different sport disciplines (e.g., basketball and tennis) and closed-skill athletes came from sports such as running, and swimming. Participants’ visual search abilities, visual working memory (Corsi Span -Backwards), and reasoning abilities (Cognitive Reflection Task) were investigated and the PsyToolkit platform was used to create and administer the tasks (Stoet, 2010; Stoet, 2017). Only visual search abilities were superior in open-skill athletes when compared to both closed-skill athletes and non-athletes. Furthermore, the findings revealed nonsignificant differences between closed-skills athletes and non-athletes for all tasks. Accordingly, sport practice appears to be beneficial for some aspects of cognitive function. However, the present results must be interpreted with due caution, given that pre-existent differences in cognitive function could lead participants to become more successful in one sport than another.