Quickly distinguishing teammates’ jerseys from those of opponents is crucial in invasion sports such as basketball, where teams share the same playing space. This is a cognitive skill that can be trained.
This is the finding of a study led by a team of researchers from the University of Milano-Bicocca, which shows that selective attention—particularly the kind based on visual features—is enhanced in athletes who practise invasion sports.
These attentional abilities are essential across all sports, influencing performance and athletes’ ability to adapt. However, until now, few studies had explored how the type of sport practised might refine specific components of selective attention.
To fill this gap, a research team—Luisa Girelli, Simona Perrone, Simone Mattavelli and Marco Petilli (University of Milano-Bicocca), Luca Bovolon (University of Chieti-Pescara), and Carlotta Lega (University of Pavia)—conducted a study titled “Playing sports to shape attention: enhanced feature-based selective attention in invasion sports players”, recently published in the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise.
The researchers invited athletes to take part in two experiments designed to examine how the cognitive demands of different types of sports—in particular, invasion vs. non-invasion sports (typically those where teams are separated by a net and do not share the same space)—affect two subcomponents of selective attention: feature-based attention (FBA) and spatial-based attention (SBA).
“In the first experiment, 20 basketball players (an invasion sport) and 20 control participants, equally divided by gender, completed two tasks: a visual search task to assess FBA and a task to measure SBA,” explains Luca Bovolon, one of the study’s authors. “The results showed that athletes in invasion sports demonstrated greater feature-based attention, while no significant differences emerged in the spatial attention task.” These findings suggest that training in invasion sports specifically enhances FBA without affecting general spatial attention.
To explore whether this effect was truly sport-specific, the study was replicated with 22 volleyball players (a non-invasion sport) and 23 control participants. The results showed no group differences in attentional measures, further supporting the hypothesis that the unique cognitive demands of invasion sports shape and refine selective attention—particularly FBA.
“Intensive sports practice is one of the best ways to train our cognitive functions,” concludes Luisa Girelli, professor of neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Milano-Bicocca and lead author of the study. “Invasion sports outperform others when it comes to boosting feature-based selective attention.”