Author(s): AVRAAMIDES, M., ANTONIOU, A., PALUDO, A.C., SHIMI, A., Institution: UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS, Country: CYPRUS, Abstract-ID: 968

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.