Conveners
Sharper minds, Smarter athletes: the Cognitive Side of Sports
- Valentina Bianco (Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, 27100, Pavia, Italy)
- Luisa Girelli (Università di MIlano-Bicocca)
The flow state is defined as an optimal state of consciousness in which athletes experience total absorption, feelings of being extremely focused, and prolonged pleasantness. Such a concept has recently received particular interest in sports science because of a possible tight relationship with enhanced athletic performance. Hitherto, the attempts to investigate the neural correlates of the...
The symposium examines the cognitive and neuropsychological foundations of athletic performance, with a focus on how sports practice both engages and shapes higher-order mental functions. Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and motor sciences, the symposium tackles aspects related to flow state, effort, cognitive-motor training, perceptual learning and concussion. The...
Perception of effort (PE) is a multifaceted construct, partly arising from corollary discharge mechanisms associated with increased central motor command (Marcora, 2009). Crucially, it is the subjective experience of effort—rather than objective task difficulty—that has been identified as the primary determinant of physical task engagement (Greenhouse-Tucknott et al., 2022). This study...
Introduction. Proficient soccer players must process substantial amounts of information rapidly while under mental pressure1. This behavior involves specific cognitive anticipatory and decision-making process where both precision and speed are optimized2. While research in the area of sports specific motor training is abundant, the same cannot be said for the cognitive domain3.
Aim. The...
Sports performance requires rapid and accurate reactions to several sensory information. Recent evidence has highlighted the informative role of auditory cues, such as the sound of racket-ball contact in tennis, additionally to visual ones. However, research on audiovisual integration in sports remains limited. Here, we focus on the multisensory integration of auditory and visual information,...
Sports-related concussion (SRC) is a traumatic brain injury induced by biomechanical forces, typically resulting from direct impacts to the head, face, or neck. Although the associated neurological impairment is often transient, in some cases symptoms can evolve over minutes or hours and become chronic, developing into post-concussive syndrome. SRCs manifest with somatic symptoms (e.g.,...
