Can Participating in Sports Make You Better at Everyday Tasks?

Can cognitive skills attained through participation in sports transfer to your everyday life?It is clear that expert athletes outperform less skilled athletes in sport specific skills  requiring attention, speed, perception and so forth.

But can these sport specific abilities transfer to every day multitasking activities like driving and talking on your cell phone?

What was the purpose of the study?

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to find if athletes can do everyday tasks better than non-athletes. It is assumed that participating in sports relates to multitasking and increased processesing speed that can carry over to similar tasks in daily life

What was the design?

Participants: The study recruited 18 Division 1 athletes and 18 non-athletes.  The sport the participants played included baseball, gymnastics, swimming, tennis and so forth. Non-athletes were not involved in any university organized sports.

What was the outcome measured?

Street Crossing: A virtual reality street crossing task was used as the test. It involved crossing a virtual intersection while avoiding traffic.

Just to add some fun, they performed  street crossing task under three distraction conditions-no distraction, conversing on a cellular phone with a hands-free device, or listening to music through headphones on an iPod.

The participants were instructed to walk and not run.

What were the results?

Atheletes better: The athletes showed statistically significant higher success rates (75% vs 50%) in crossing the streets reflected by fewer collisions with moving vehicles. This was also true for the distracted conditions too.

Other Studies: Other studies have confirmed that athletes perform better than non-athletes in laboratory testing of cognitive measures which includes processesing speed and tests of attention. As expected, athletes from interceptive sports like basketball, baseball, soccer showed the largest gains.

Practical applications

• Participating in sports may help you become better at real life activities which require multitasking and greater processing speed.
• The study however do not exactly answer the question if these cognitive differences are due to adaptation to training , practice, or just simply better genetics that predispose them to be athletes.
• A neat little study would be to take inactive people, make them participate in a sport, and test if they improve in everyday tasks compared to a control group.

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