Playing sports to shape attention: enhanced feature-based selective attention in invasion sports players

Prolonged engagement in sports that place high demands on cognitive functions may result in perceptual and cognitive enhancements. However, empirical evidence on the effect of sport-specific constraints on attentional mechanisms remains limited. Here, we address this gap with two experiments that examine how cognitive demands posed by different sports (invasion and non-invasion) affect two subcomponents of selective attention - feature-based (FBA) and spatial-based (SBA). In Experiment 1, 20 invasion sport athletes and 20 gender-matched controls completed a visual search task and a flanker task to assess FBA and SBA, respectively. Our results showed that invasion sports athletes exhibit enhanced task-specific feature-based attentional skills in the initial stages of the visual search task. Conversely, no group differences emerged in the flanker task, suggesting that invasion sports practice effect is specific to FBA rather than to general selective attention. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether this effect was related to sport type. To do so, we replicated Experiment 1 with 22 non-invasion sport athletes and 23 gender-matched controls. The results did not reveal any group difference in measures of FBA and SBA. These findings indicate that invasion sports practice selectively enhances FBA, suggesting that sport-specific cognitive demands shape and refine cognitive abilities.