The Importance of Cognitive Skills in Sports
From the Show: Children's Health
Summary:
Air Date: 10/15/20
Duration: 10 Minutes
how athletes can sharpen their abilities from the neck up by strengthening cognitive skills.
Transcription:
Caitlin Whyte: Hello and welcome. You're listening to Children's Health Checkup. I'm your host, Caitlin Whyte. Today, we are discussing cognitive skills in sports. What they are? How athletes can sharpen their cognitive skills and the ways these skills benefit sports performance. Joining us is our expert, Dr. Scott Burkhart, a Neuropsychologist at the Children's Health Andrews Institute for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. Dr. Burkhart, can you start by defining for us what cognitive skills are in the world of sports?
Dr. Burkhart: So, we really look at how athletes process information. Obviously, most of that is going to be visual with how important the eyes are in terms of sports and then what decisions they make with that information. And so while you would go through traditional strength and conditioning, we try to look at ways that we can improve visual and cognitive function as well.
Host: So, what are some of the most important cognitive skills for athletes to focus on?
Dr. Burkhart: We really spend a lot of time on maintaining attention or concentration. That seems to be a very, kind of dejour topic for athletes, especially adolescent athletes. How do I stay in tune or focused throughout the entirety of a competition or a game? We also deal a lot with decision making. So oftentimes there's multiple decisions that can be made within the context of even a single play. I think there was somewhere written that a basketball player dribbling up the basketball court has 470 different choices that they can make while progressing towards the basket on offense. So, you know, we try to really kind of unbottle that and help athletes make potentially the most correct decisions, understand the process of how they're making decisions and then see where the areas of improvement are.
Host: Can you explain to us what visual training is?
Dr. Burkhart: Yeah. So a lot of what we've learned about the eyes comes from what we've known or have acquired and learning about eyes that have dysfunction. And so we've taken what we know about normal functioning eyes and what happens after those eyes in terms damage and where you have kind of flipped that logic on its head and said, okay, well now we know what normal eyes do. What do potentially superior or high functioning eyes do? And we try to train eyes up to improve. So whether that's maintaining gaze, right. So how long do I hold my gaze on a particular target? Or how fast can I get there? So I speed matters, right? And how quickly I move my eyes or how much visual information can I process in a short period of time.
Host: And can you break down each of these specific skills for us?
Dr. Burkhart: Sure. In terms of more vision or more cognition?
Host: I'd say the visual training aspect.
Dr. Burkhart: A lot of the research has shown with elite athletes that they are better adept at finding targets quicker, and then they also maintain their gaze on that target longer. So think of a high school quarterback, he's going to find the open receiver faster, but he's also going to look at that receiver to maintain that contact while performing the sports-related movement. And so what we want to do is we want to see how quickly do the eyes move. There's an agonist antagonist pair of ocular muscles that we use when scanning. And so we try to evaluate and examine how well the athlete is visually scanning. Then we want to know, can they use that visual information to make the right decision or choice? So is the actual identified fixation target the right one so we can make some improvements there, how quickly they get there and can they lock in and can they find it? And then it becomes a matter of performing the sport related movement. And you can obviously tell in terms of, you know, probably this conversation, there's a lot of overlap between visual and cognition.
Host: Gosh, this is so interesting. So Dr. Burkhart, how can athletes improve these cognitive skills, I guess, off the field also?
Dr. Burkhart: So, we really look at opportunities for what they can be doing at home. I think really dedicated athletes want to improve constantly. And it's that drive, right? It's, you know, the gains are made in practice and training. They very rarely are made in terms of competition. And so what we do is based on the athlete's specific needs, is prescribed plans and programs that may be detailed to where they can improve, we want to see and have conversations with them about their performance. So talking through how they felt about maybe a prior performance and what can continue to be improved, we try to teach athletes to evaluate their own performance a lot. So if tape is available or even recounting, it's always easier to remember things right after an event occurs. So can they even almost write a quick synopsis of their performance immediately after it occurred? That's a very unique thing to ask an athlete now to do, but it can be incredibly valuable in terms of how they would evaluate their own purpose.
Host: Great, Dr. Burkhart, is there anything else you'd like to share about cognitive skills in sports?
Dr. Burkhart: I just think it's really important. It's a cusp of kind of science in terms of how we understand sports science and there's increasing traction being gained and paid attention. And in the research world on these things, it's a very fascinating kind of frontier of sports science.
Host: It is so fascinating. You never think about this stuff. You know, the Sunday I was watching football, never thought of their cognitive skills.
Dr. Burkhart: Yeah. A lot of those athletes, I mean, they're very finely tuned. There's even the elite athletes are often the ones that are the most exceptional at these things that we're talking about and it's not by accident. Yeah,
Host: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Burkhart for taking the time to share this with us. We appreciate it. And thank you for listening to this episode of Children's Health Checkup. You can find more information on sports health at childrens.com/Andrews. I'm Caitlin Whyte, stay well.
Caitlin Whyte: Hello and welcome. You're listening to Children's Health Checkup. I'm your host, Caitlin Whyte. Today, we are discussing cognitive skills in sports. What they are? How athletes can sharpen their cognitive skills and the ways these skills benefit sports performance. Joining us is our expert, Dr. Scott Burkhart, a Neuropsychologist at the Children's Health Andrews Institute for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. Dr. Burkhart, can you start by defining for us what cognitive skills are in the world of sports?
Dr. Burkhart: So, we really look at how athletes process information. Obviously, most of that is going to be visual with how important the eyes are in terms of sports and then what decisions they make with that information. And so while you would go through traditional strength and conditioning, we try to look at ways that we can improve visual and cognitive function as well.
Host: So, what are some of the most important cognitive skills for athletes to focus on?
Dr. Burkhart: We really spend a lot of time on maintaining attention or concentration. That seems to be a very, kind of dejour topic for athletes, especially adolescent athletes. How do I stay in tune or focused throughout the entirety of a competition or a game? We also deal a lot with decision making. So oftentimes there's multiple decisions that can be made within the context of even a single play. I think there was somewhere written that a basketball player dribbling up the basketball court has 470 different choices that they can make while progressing towards the basket on offense. So, you know, we try to really kind of unbottle that and help athletes make potentially the most correct decisions, understand the process of how they're making decisions and then see where the areas of improvement are.
Host: Can you explain to us what visual training is?
Dr. Burkhart: Yeah. So a lot of what we've learned about the eyes comes from what we've known or have acquired and learning about eyes that have dysfunction. And so we've taken what we know about normal functioning eyes and what happens after those eyes in terms damage and where you have kind of flipped that logic on its head and said, okay, well now we know what normal eyes do. What do potentially superior or high functioning eyes do? And we try to train eyes up to improve. So whether that's maintaining gaze, right. So how long do I hold my gaze on a particular target? Or how fast can I get there? So I speed matters, right? And how quickly I move my eyes or how much visual information can I process in a short period of time.
Host: And can you break down each of these specific skills for us?
Dr. Burkhart: Sure. In terms of more vision or more cognition?
Host: I'd say the visual training aspect.
Dr. Burkhart: A lot of the research has shown with elite athletes that they are better adept at finding targets quicker, and then they also maintain their gaze on that target longer. So think of a high school quarterback, he's going to find the open receiver faster, but he's also going to look at that receiver to maintain that contact while performing the sports-related movement. And so what we want to do is we want to see how quickly do the eyes move. There's an agonist antagonist pair of ocular muscles that we use when scanning. And so we try to evaluate and examine how well the athlete is visually scanning. Then we want to know, can they use that visual information to make the right decision or choice? So is the actual identified fixation target the right one so we can make some improvements there, how quickly they get there and can they lock in and can they find it? And then it becomes a matter of performing the sport related movement. And you can obviously tell in terms of, you know, probably this conversation, there's a lot of overlap between visual and cognition.
Host: Gosh, this is so interesting. So Dr. Burkhart, how can athletes improve these cognitive skills, I guess, off the field also?
Dr. Burkhart: So, we really look at opportunities for what they can be doing at home. I think really dedicated athletes want to improve constantly. And it's that drive, right? It's, you know, the gains are made in practice and training. They very rarely are made in terms of competition. And so what we do is based on the athlete's specific needs, is prescribed plans and programs that may be detailed to where they can improve, we want to see and have conversations with them about their performance. So talking through how they felt about maybe a prior performance and what can continue to be improved, we try to teach athletes to evaluate their own performance a lot. So if tape is available or even recounting, it's always easier to remember things right after an event occurs. So can they even almost write a quick synopsis of their performance immediately after it occurred? That's a very unique thing to ask an athlete now to do, but it can be incredibly valuable in terms of how they would evaluate their own purpose.
Host: Great, Dr. Burkhart, is there anything else you'd like to share about cognitive skills in sports?
Dr. Burkhart: I just think it's really important. It's a cusp of kind of science in terms of how we understand sports science and there's increasing traction being gained and paid attention. And in the research world on these things, it's a very fascinating kind of frontier of sports science.
Host: It is so fascinating. You never think about this stuff. You know, the Sunday I was watching football, never thought of their cognitive skills.
Dr. Burkhart: Yeah. A lot of those athletes, I mean, they're very finely tuned. There's even the elite athletes are often the ones that are the most exceptional at these things that we're talking about and it's not by accident. Yeah,
Host: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Burkhart for taking the time to share this with us. We appreciate it. And thank you for listening to this episode of Children's Health Checkup. You can find more information on sports health at childrens.com/Andrews. I'm Caitlin Whyte, stay well.