Professional athletes have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning complex and neutral dynamic visual scenes.
Evidence suggests that an athlete’s sports-related perceptual-cognitive expertise is a crucial element of top-level competitive sports.
When directly assessing whether such experience-related abilities correspond to fundamental and non-specific cognitive laboratory measures such as processing speed and attention, studies have shown moderate effects leading to the conclusion that their special abilities are context-specific.
This demonstrates that a distinguishing factor explaining the capacities of professional athletes is their ability to learn how to process complex dynamic visual scenes.
This gives us an insight as to what is so special about the elite athletes’ mental abilities, which allows them to express great prowess in action.