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Collegiate badminton expertise is associated with interference-control and response-inhibition task performance: a
Yihan Zhang1,2, Yuqing Wang2, Xianghe Wang1
1College of Physical Education, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China.
Introduction:
Badminton places repeated demands on selecting task-relevant cues while withholding prepared actions, yet evidence for domain-general inhibitory-control differences associated with sport expertise remains mixed. This study examined whether collegiate badminton expertise was associated with performance on two non-sport-specific tasks assessing interference control and response inhibition.
Methods:
Sixty-eight right-handed university students (33 badminton experts and 35 novices) completed a color-word Stroop task followed by a Go/NoGo task. The primary Stroop outcome was the participant-level interference cost, calculated as incongruent minus congruent reaction time. Go/NoGo performance was characterized by hit rate, false-alarm rate, and a trial-level logistic mixed-effects model of NoGo errors. Corrected d' was treated as a secondary measure because of ceiling and floor constraints.
Results:
Experts showed a smaller Stroop interference cost than novices after reaction-time cleaning (13.6 vs. 44.6 ms; novice-expert difference = 31.0 ms, 95% CI [25.2, 37.3], p < 0.001, d = 2.33), with consistent conclusions from untrimmed, speed-adjusted, and inverse-efficiency analyses. Overall Stroop accuracy did not differ between groups. In the Go/NoGo task, experts responded faster on Go trials (259 vs. 290 ms), showed higher hit rates (0.9976 vs. 0.9825), and lower false-alarm rates (0.0049 vs. 0.0264). Trial-level modeling indicated lower odds of a NoGo error among experts (OR = 0.19, 95% CI [0.10, 0.36], p < 0.001). Corrected d' was also higher among experts; however, it was upper-censored, with 10 of 33 experts attaining the maximum value, limiting its interpretation at the individual level.
Discussion:
Collegiate badminton expertise was associated with better performance on both interference-control and response-inhibition tasks, suggesting that expertise-related differences may extend beyond badminton-specific perceptual and motor contexts. However, these associations should be interpreted as task- and sample-specific rather than as evidence of a unitary inhibitory-control advantage. Because the study was cross-sectional and lacked both an active-athlete control group and a pure processing-speed baseline, the findings do not establish whether the observed differences resulted from badminton training or pre-existing individual characteristics.
