Investigating the Cognitive Basis of Light Training Tasks: The Role of Attention

Background/Objectives: Light training tasks are widely used in athletic training, yet the cognitive processes that underlie performance on these tasks remain poorly understood. Method: In this study, we investigated whether exogenous attentional orienting and visual search abilities could explain individual differences in performance on SpeedPad, a Virtual Reality light training task, in participants who engage in physical exercise and in controls. Results: Our results showed that participants engaging in physical exercise outperformed those who did not in SpeedPad sessions that required fast reactions to targets with or without distractors. Furthermore, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that engagement in physical exercise accounted for a significant amount of variance in SpeedPad performance. In addition, both the cueing benefit from an exogenous orienting task and the intercept of a visual search task with feature search trials accounted for unique variance in SpeedPad performance. Conclusions: Overall, the current findings suggest that performance in light training tasks such as SpeedPad depends on both physical/physiological and cognitive factors, especially those related to different types of attention.