������ý

Simple mental tests may be able to identify people who are likely to reach the top of their sport. That’s according to researchers who showed that elite athletes who play team sports aren’t just stronger and faster than the rest of us – some of their cognitive skills are better, too.

Young soccer players, competing at the top level in Sweden, performed better than the general population on tests of so-called “executive function”. And the better their results, the more goals they scored.

Executive function isn’t a measure of intelligence – it describes unconscious mental abilities like our working memory, which is involved in manipulating transient information to help us make decisions, and attentional control, which is our ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

You can test aspects of your own executive function by taking two simple tests, such as the and the .

In the first test, you will see words like “red” written in different coloured inks. Your task is to name the colour of the ink rather than read out the word. It tests your brain’s ability to inhibit certain learned responses and your ability to focus for long periods of time.

Mental flexibility

The second test measures your brain’s processing speed, visual search speed and mental flexibility by getting you to draw a line between ascending numbers spread randomly on a page.

Torbjörn Vestberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and his colleagues carried out these tests and others on 49 players from an elite soccer academy in Sweden. All of the participants were under 20 years of age. Even after controlling for other factors that could affect their performance on the field, the athletes who had higher scores of executive function netted more goals over a two-year period.

According to Vestberg, skills associated with executive function match up with what is required of soccer players and other athletes. “When you’re more successful in soccer, you have cognitive flexibility, you can shift focus, you can suppress behaviour, you can be creative and find solutions very fast,” he says.

Vestberg and his group had previously that executive function correlated with success in adult soccer players, but this new study showed the same tests could predict success in young players too – even though their executive function skills might not be as fully developed. Most executive functions take place in the frontal lobes of the brain, which don’t finish developing until a person is in their late teens or early twenties.

It makes sense for athletes competing at the highest level to have these enhanced mental abilities, based on the actions they need to take on the field, says at the University of Montreal, Canada.

“It’s on the fly decision making,” he says. “Reading all the input, taking all that in and acting on it does require some fundamental cognitive capacities.”

Predicting success

Faubert has in professional soccer, hockey and rugby players, and found – like Vestberg –  that athletes performed above the general population. The effect has also been found in .

Cognitive tests might help coaches identify “late bloomers”, says Vestberg – those youngsters who might start off smaller physically, putting them at a disadvantage against their larger peers, but who have the cognitive profile to grow to be successful athletes later on.

The tests might also help players and coaches find areas of weakness and so design strategies to compensate, or to identify which position on the field a player should take. “For instance, you might have a different sort of cognitive profile if you’re a striker, midfielder or a defender,” says Vestberg.

This research doesn’t answer the nature versus nurture question – it isn’t clear if the cognitive skill in athletes is innate, or if it is a result of training, says Faubert. But the research helps tease out the things that make elite athletes special.

“We’re trying to build a notion of what the make-up of an elite athlete is,” says Faubert. “You can’t just look at physical attributes, and you can’t only use their knowledge of the game. Knowledge of the game is critical, but how well you make decisions, that’s when you can compete.”

Read more: Sports engineering: The physics of sport; Concussed athletes more likely to injure their legs months later; Legal ketone sports supplement pushes athletes further faster