Team ball sport participation is associated with performance in two sustained visual attention tasks: Position...

We investigated the relationship between participation in team ball sports and performance in two sustained spatiotemporal attention tasks-a position monitoring variant of the multiple object tracking (MOT) task and target identification in the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Thirty participants were asked about the frequency of their participation in team ball sports and undertook both the MOT task and RSVP task. In the MOT task, participants viewed an array of eight discs as they moved unpredictably for 3-8s before disappearing. On each trial, a subset of these were marked as targets for tracking, meaning that participants attempted to keep track of their positions on the screen with as much precision as possible. At the end of each trial, participants reported the final perceived position of a queried target. In the RSVP task, a stream of letters was presented at the center of the screen and participants attempted to report either one or both of two target letters embedded in the stream. Participation in team ball sports was associated with superior performance in both tasks: in the MOT task, individuals reporting more time spent playing team ball sports on a weekly basis were able to report the positions of targets with greater precision, and in the RSVP task they reported targets more accurately. The current findings add to the literature of somewhat mixed findings regarding the extent to which participation in sports may be associated with superior visual attention abilities.