2025 February 7
4 Pain read
Professional football players can show extra cognitive control
Higher football players show cognitive abilities for strategist and conditioning

Soccer fans sometimes represent themselves as they could be powers in the highest levels of sport, like athletic heroes who see on the field. If they find the opportunity to try, they will learn that their body will not cooperate and they can seriously hurt.
And many of them also ignore the “beautiful game” brain game. Goal n US National Academy of Science Academy, An international research team says he has now confirmed that the body is successful on the football field as well. The group of Leonardo Bonetti, Leonardo Bonetti at the Denhus University and the University of Oxford examined the types of intelligence and identity and found that they have extraordinary cognitive competencies as well as a typical psychological profile.
Participants consisted of more than 200 professional professionals in Brazil and Sweden, and about 9% of them were women. Subjects completed the personality questionnaire and filled several cognitive tests. Researchers compared athletes with the results of the control group and the same general population measures.
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Among other things, professional players showed better work memory and showed better performance in planning and problem resolution. But above all, they really shone to the executive function, regulating information treatment, which helps adapt to the events that are changing in the demand of the request. In particular, elite athletes did it above the rule Design Fluence testthe measure of cognitive flexibility.
Design Fluence test has been a faulty A good marker of the mind At the previous research football field, the higher scores were represented by players who had higher skills to develop strategy and study the play. “It can be the ability to achieve various steps to achieve a quick change goal, it can be one of the most important cognitive processes associated with the most successful behavior of complex sports like football,” Bonetti and his colleagues write on their new paper.
In the identity test, athletes were also prominent in self-discipline, energy, extraction, and other factors. But at first glance, one thing was not a photo of the successor in a group sport: the players were evaluated than other people were more social and cooperative because they were focused on their performance.
Other studies demonstrated that professional football players have the only cognitive profile, but these research had less frequent players who had less frequent samples. “Our study novel reproduced the previous results, but it can also be considered in the first conclusive study,” says Predrag Petrovic, the author of the new paper author and holder of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. (Elite players show cognitive skills above the rule. But the nature of the game can jeopardize these higher skills. Collision with ball titles and other players can create injuries with greater risk of dementia.))
Denis Hauw, Professor of Sports Psychology, University of Sports Science Professor, has not been involved in research, “The psychological factors associated with the scattered discoveries of the discoveries that tried to explain the studies.”
Another researcher did not have a convincing field. Jaap Oosterlaan, Professor of the Pediatrician of Amsterdam of the University of Vrija, was also not a member of the study group. Differences in elite players and control groups. The results for comparing the AI systems to play classic statistics, says Oosterlaan, but the analysis of the system could not be credited with cognitive skills or identity characteristics related to the highest performance of elite players. Moreover, the differences between elite players and non-non-physical training in the operation of the brain and did not “when they began to play” were “,” they began football “.
Football can be the most popular sport in the world, but Petrovic warns that higher cognitive skills can be found in some other sports players, such as Quarterbacks and backballs in American football and basketball players. “That’s Nikola in Joki & Cacute; (Denver Nuggets), who I want to try at some point,” he noted.
For the study, the team used artificial intelligence system to find patterns in test scores that could be used to evaluate cognitive and identity characteristics, and elite athletes were not separated by the control group elite sports 97 percent accurately. “I anticipate such cognitive measures everywhere (soccer) in 10 years, to find a group of novels, (as well) to influence the agents in a group, and a group and individuals based on groups and cognitive profiles,” Petrovic says.
AI, however, did not identify from some uninstalled players; Overcoming the relevant cognitive and identity attributes, such a system can forget other key features. There are certainly the general population that show proper cognitive profile. But to climb football in football, you need to have the right physical conditions in addition to the right heads. And when you go out on the field, motivation must be there: really want It.
This article originally appeared Science spectrum and reproduced with permission.