The cognitive status of top and recreational athletes in contact sports

Radošević, Zoran. (2015). The cognitive status of top and recreational athletes in contact sports. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Psychology. [mentor Vranić, Andrea].

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Abstract

In sport, elite athletes develop through long-term training better cognitive abilities than their less successful counterparts. On the other side, research describes that long-term training can result in short-term and sometimes long-term cognitive deficits. Guided by this conflicting evidence, this study tested the hypothesis on better cognitive abilities, of elite male (n=40) and female (n=37), compared with an identical group of recreational male (n=25) and female (n=30) athletes in contact sports, and the hypothesis on better results of the elite male compared to the elite female athletes. The cognitive battery of tests comprised four tests and two questionnaires – a demographic questionnaire and a questionnaire on alertness and emotional status. Processing speed, short-term memory, impulsivity, working memory, and perceptual speed were all tested. The results show a great similarity in the cognitive status of all the athletes. In the impulsivity result, the elite male and female athletes were statistically better than the recreational ones. In the perceptual speed test, the effect of sex was statistically significant – both the elite and recreational female athletes achieved better results than the male athletes. Possible cultural differences between the Croatian and American results were considered in the discussion, as well as problems with the definition and determination of the term elite athlete, and some suggestions for improving this type of research were proposed.

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