Do athletes excel at everyday tasks

In today’s fast-paced multitasking world, individuals encounter daily situations that require efficient processing of environmental stimuli and attention to concurrent tasks. An ability to focus and divide attention, quickly integrate perceptions and memories, and sustain concentration while juggling multiple tasks is likely to improve performance on these everyday challenges. The present study used virtual reality to explore how participation in sport relates to these multitasking and speed of processing skills in a realistic virtual reality street crossing task. Two broad approaches pervade the sport-cognition literature. Some investigations attempt to understand the interaction between an athlete and his or her environment of expertise by using tasks designed to simulate sport context (e.g., soccer players search for a soccer ball in a realistic visual search scene) (10, 29). In general, this research suggests that expert athletes outperform nonexperts on sport-specific tests of attention, memory, speed, and perception (16, 29, 32). Although this expert performance approach is valuable for knowledge about expertise differences in sport-specific cognition, other researchers study whether sport expertise can transcend sport to influence fundamental cognitive and perceptual measures outside the sport-specific domain (22). Performance benefits for athletes relative to control participants have been observed in classical laboratory tasks in which the testing environment is stripped of sport context (i.e., the modality of the laboratory task differs from the modality of the sport-specific field task) (3, 9, 15, 19–22, 24,25). A meta-analysis further examined the relationship between sports training and core cognitive processes and reported a small-to-medium effect such that athletes outperformed nonathletes on laboratory measures of cognition including processing speed and measures of attention (31). Taken together, it is possible that both sport-specific and sport-general cognitive enhancements are associated with competitive sport training. The present study extended the sport-cognition literature by studying athlete and nonathlete performance on a realistic street crossing task that challenged fundamental cognitive and perceptual skills. A street intersection was modeled in an immersive virtual reality environment, and participants were asked to navigate trafficked roads under different distraction conditions by walking on a treadmill that was integrated with the virtual world (17). We specifically used the street crossing paradigm to study the multitasking and processing speed abilities of collegiate athletes and nonathletes. Multitasking can be defined as an ability to perform more than one task concurrently. To successfully cross a street, pedestrians have to simultaneously attend to the flow of traffic, monitor and remember vehicle distances and speeds, and execute a crossing. Moreover, street crossing requires the coordination and simultaneous performance of multiple subtasks, not simply the performance of subtasks that do not overlap in time. Thus, we examined multitasking in athletes and nonathletes by studying their ability to successfully cross a virtual street. Further, subjects were sometimes asked to cross the street while conversing on a cellular phone or listening to music, two realistic distracter tasks that might introduce additional multitask challenges. Speed enhancements for athletes have been reported in a sport-specific context (16) as well as in aspects of fundamental cognition (1, 3, 9, 19, 31). It is probable that an ability to quickly and flexibly (20) perceive, process, and respond to incoming environmental stimuli plays a role in street crossing performance. Further, multitasking is said to relate to efficiency of information processing (7, 23). Thus, we administered a laboratory-based cognitive test of simple reaction time (RT) to try to provide some specificity to the cognitive abilities associated with potential athlete and non-athlete performance differences on the realistic multitask paradigm. We hypothesized that Division I athletes would show superior performance on the street crossing task, which would relate to faster processing speed on the simple RT task.