Maybe life just isn’t fair, after all. Not only can elite athletes jump higher and move faster than most of us, but a new study suggests that in some ways they can think faster, too.
A study of 87 top-ranked Brazilian volleyball players (some of them medalists in the Beijing and London Olympics) and 67 of their nonathletic contemporaries found that athletes excel in how quickly their brains absorb and respond to new information. Being an athlete also minimized cognitive differences that normally appear between men and women.
For example, female athletes were similar to their male peers in the speed of certain mental calculations and reaction times, while nonathletic females performed the same tasks more slowly than their male counterparts.
“I think we have learned that athletes are different from us in some ways,” says psychology professor Arthur Kramer, director of Beckman Institute, who led the study with graduate student Heloisa Alves.
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. And in general, they were better able to accomplish tasks while ignoring confusing or irrelevant information.
Female athletes had significant cognitive advantages over their nonathletic counterparts, Kramer says, with female athletes being faster than their nonathletic peers at detecting changes in a scene. They could also more quickly pick out relevant details from a distracting background.
The female athletes’ performance on these and other tasks was on par with the male athletes, whereas nonathletic males consistently outperformed their female peers.
Nonathletes excelled at only one of the cognitive tests administered by the researchers. It was called a “stopping task,” in which participants were asked to type a “Z” or “/” key as soon as they saw it on the screen, unless they heard a tone shortly after the character appeared. Nonathletes tended to be faster when the tone never sounded, while athletes were better at inhibiting their response when the tone sounded.
The ability to inhibit a response is one marker of what brain researchers call “executive function,” the capacity to control, plan, and regulate one’s behavior, Kramer says. While it has obvious advantages in sports, the ability to quickly inhibit an action also is useful in daily life, he says.
“One way to think about it is you’re in your car and you’re ready to start off at a light and you catch in your side vision a car or a bicyclist that you didn’t see a second ago,” he says. Being able to stop after having decided to go can be a lifesaver in that situation.
Kramer says the athletes’ slower performance on this one task might be the result of strategic decision-making as they waited to see if the tone sounded before they pressed a key.
While the study adds to evidence that those who spend years on physical activities also enhance their cognitive abilities, there remains much to be learned, Kramer says.
“Our understanding is imperfect because we don’t know whether these abilities in the athletes were ‘born’ or ‘made,’” he says. “Perhaps people gravitate to these sports because they’re good at both. Or perhaps it’s the training that enhances their cognitive abilities as well as their physical ones. My intuition is that it’s a little bit of both.”
