Are Athletes Better Performers Outside Sport?

Marlins Mike Stanton Rounds Third Base After Homer

Performing at the highest level in many sports requires the development of a complex group of cognitive, fine motor, gross motor, eye-hand coordination and fitness skills.

These multiple skill domains are often performed in a emotionally-charged environment where multi-tasking.  Think a baseball batter monitoring signals from coaches, remembering a pitcher's preference for pitches in certain situation and performing on the road where a sell out crowd roars with each pitch.

This batter then need to use visual skills, timing and motor skills making a swing that where he hopes to land at least a base hit.

A sports exercise research team recently as a good research question related to this type of sport specific skill: "Do athletes perform better in non-sport \tasks that also require quick action and multitasking?

Laura Chaddock and a research team from the University of Illinois recently published online the results of their study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.  The authors wanted to know if athletes with specific sport training would be able to perform a non-sport physical activity better than non-athletes.

To do this they developed a real-life virtual reality task of quickly and safely crossing a two-way street.  This paradigm requires a special facility and involves manual treadmills, computer simulation of traffic and wireless liquid crystal goggles that provide a sense of depth perception and movement.

The athlete group in the study include 18 University of Illinois participating in NCAA intercollegiate athletics (two baseball, one cross-country runner, one gymnast, two soccer players, five swimmer's, three tennis players, one track-and-field athlete and three wrestlers.  Athletes spent average of 20 hours per week practicing their college sport. Nonathlete controls were not involved in an athletic activites organized by the University of Illinois.

Athletes and controls completed three separate trials--one with no distraction, one while talking on a cell phone and one trial while listening to music through an iPod.

Both groups also completed a simple reaction time task using a desk top computer.

Here were the key results of the study:

• Athletes successfully crossed the street within a 30 second time limit 75% of the time with no distraction compared to only 56% in the non-athlete controls (statistically significant with p<.05)
• Athletes also were more successful under both distraction trials
• Athletes were less likely to be involved in a pedestrian collision during a simulation (23% vs 39% for non-athlete controls
• Athletes reaction time was significantly less than non-athlete controls and this variable negatively correlated with street crossing success rates (individuals with slow reaction times had lower success rates)

The authors note that their cross-sectional study cannot address causality.  One explanation for the results is that sport training provides improvements in reaction time and other psychomotor performance variables that translate to other non-sport multitasking setting.  An second possible explanation is that those with an innate psychomotor skill advantage perform better in athletics and other performance situations like the one found in this street-crossing simulation.  

It is also possible that both of the proposed explanations contribute something to this effects.  

This study also made me think about the effect of age-related reduction in reaction time and the performance in real-world street crossings and other potentially dangerous situations.  This type of simulation could be used in research related to this topic.

Photo of Mike Stanton homering against Chicago Cubs from the author's collection.


Chaddock, L., Neider, M., Voss, M., Gaspar, J., & Kramer, A. (2011). Do Athletes Excel At Everyday Tasks? Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0b013e318218ca74