ECSS Paris 2023: OP-SH18
BACKGROUND: Expert performance in sport is often assumed to rely on sport-specific perceptual-motor skills. However, some advantages may reflect more general cognitive mechanisms that could transfer across tasks and domains. Combat sports such as judo place high demands on rapid orienting and reorienting of attention under time pressure, raising the possibility that expertise-related attentional advantages may generalize beyond the athlete’s sport. The present study examined whether expert judokas outperform non-athlete controls in a virtual reality (VR) goalkeeping task unrelated to their sport but previously shown to rely on attentional orienting. METHODS: Fifteen male black-belt judokas and 15 controls completed two experimental sessions using VKeepR, a commercial VR goalkeeping application. In both sessions, participants responded to 60 high-speed shots delivered from two cannons outside the penalty area. In Session 1, they blocked red balls while allowing green and blue balls to pass. In Session 2, before each shot, participants identified a target ball color and blocked only shots of that color, allowing others to pass. The target color was determined dynamically by identifying the most frequent color among nine balls on the pitch. Prior to the VR sessions, participants completed the International Fitness Scale (IFIS) and two computerized cognitive tasks. Attentional orienting was assessed using a Posner exogenous cueing task with valid, invalid, and neutral cues. Response inhibition was assessed using a computerized Go/No-Go task. RESULTS: Judokas demonstrated superior performance in both VKeepR sessions compared to controls, despite the task being outside their sport of expertise. This advantage remained significant after controlling for arm span and IFIS variables, F(1,22)=19.26, p<.001 and F(1,22)=8.34, p=.001 for Sessions 1 and 2, respectively. Judokas also showed faster reaction times in the cueing task (p’s<.05 for valid, invalid, and neutral cues), but no group differences emerged in d′ or reaction time in the Go/No-Go task. Significant associations between attentional orienting measures and VR performance were observed across the whole sample (p’s<.05). Notably, among judokas, VKeepR performance correlated with International Judo Federation ranking, r(11)=−.63, p<.02 and r(11)=−.65, p=.016 for Sessions 1 and 2. CONCLUSION: The findings indicate that expert athletes can exhibit performance advantages in complex, time-pressured tasks outside their domain of expertise. The convergence of superior performance in both a laboratory-based attention task and an unrelated VR interception task suggests that domain-general attentional orienting skills, rather than sport-specific motor experience, contribute to performance in VKeepR. These results support the view that core perceptual-cognitive abilities may underpin transfer across sports and highlight the utility of VR tasks for probing cognitive mechanisms relevant to athletic performance.
Read CV Marios AvraamidesECSS Paris 2023: OP-SH18
This study introduces and validates a novel visuospatial dual 2-back task designed to induce acute mental fatigue through sustained working memory updating. The task was embedded in a controlled experimental protocol specifically developed to address major methodological limitations of time-on-task paradigms, including learning effects, boredom-related disengagement, and the lack of objective indices of mental effort. Seventy-three healthy young adults continuously performed the dual 2-back task for 30 minutes without rest, ensuring prolonged and highly demanding cognitive engagement. Subjective ratings of fatigue, sleepiness, and boredom were collected, together with behavioral performance assessed using signal detection theory, with perceptual sensitivity (d') as the primary outcome. In parallel, psychophysiological markers of mental effort and cognitive control were recorded, including electroencephalographic measures (P300 amplitude, stimulus-locked frontal theta power, posterior alpha power density) and cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity. The task induced a significant increase in self-reported fatigue and sleepiness, accompanied by a robust decline in perceptual sensitivity, indicating a progressive impairment in working memory updating. Importantly, performance decrements remained significant when boredom was statistically controlled, demonstrating that they cannot be explained by monotony or task disengagement alone. Neurophysiological results converged with behavioral findings: P300 amplitude decreased over time, reflecting reduced efficiency of executive processing, while alpha power increased in prefrontal and parieto-occipital regions, suggesting increasing difficulty in maintaining attentional focus. In contrast, frontal midline theta activity and PEP reactivity, both considered markers of mental effort engagement, remained stable throughout the task, indicating sustained control demands despite declining performance. Together, these findings validate the dual 2-back task as a robust and reliable method for inducing acute mental fatigue under controlled conditions. The dissociation between preserved effort-related signaling and declining executive efficiency provides empirical support for contemporary effort-based models of mental fatigue, in which performance deterioration reflects reduced control efficiency rather than simple effort withdrawal. Finally, the substantial interindividual variability observed highlights the need for future studies to explicitly consider different fatigue regulation strategies, such as effort disengagement versus compensatory effort, when investigating the mechanisms and consequences of mental fatigue.
Read CV Axel GiraultECSS Paris 2023: OP-SH18
Introduction: Inhibitory control is a core executive function that supports the regulation of goal-directed behavior in classroom contexts, including the suppression of inappropriate motor, verbal, or attentional responses (Ludyga et al., 2022). Acute physical exercise has the potential to benefit inhibitory control (Oberste et al., 2019), which may translate into improved classroom behavior. We investigated the transient effects of different types of exercise on both inhibitory control and off-task behavior in children and adolescents. Methods: In two experimental studies with a pre-posttest design, participants were randomized to two exercise groups and a control group. The exercise groups differed in cooperative demands in experiment 1 (age: 11.6 ± 0.6 y; N=101) and in coordinative demands in experiment 2 (age: 13.1 ± 1.2 y; N=111). In both experiments, off-task behavior was assessed from video recordings of a regular classroom lesson and categorized as on-task, passive off-task, noise-related off-task, or motor off-task behavior by two independent raters. Additionally, Inhibitory control was measured using a computerized flanker task. Path modeling was applied to examine general and specific effects of exercise on off-task behavior, while considering indirect effects via changes in inhibitory control. Results: Across both experiments, exercise was associated with lower-off-task behavior at posttest, when autoregressive effects were accounted for. While cooperative demands were not related to off-task behavior at posttest, exercise with additional coordinative demands increase the frequency of off-task behavior. Path analysis further revealed a decreased reaction time on incongruent trials of the Flanker task, but this decrease was not related to off-task behavior at posttest. Conclusion: A single exercise session embedded in the school day can transiently decrease off-task behavior in the classroom, when the coordinative demands of the exercise session are low. While these effects are accompanied by improvements in inhibitory control, changes in this cognitive ability do not underlie alterations in classroom behavior. Ludyga, S., Gerber, M., Brand, S., Möhring, W., & Pühse, U. (2022). Do different cognitive domains mediate the association between moderate‐to‐vigorous physical activity and adolescents’ off‐task behaviour in the classroom?. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(1), e12445. Oberste, M., Javelle, F., Sharma, S., Joisten, N., Walzik, D., Bloch, W., & Zimmer, P. (2019). Effects and moderators of acute aerobic exercise on subsequent interference control: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 2616.
Read CV Sebastian LudygaECSS Paris 2023: OP-SH18