Sports Neuroscience and Motor / Cognitive Functions

Saturday, 04 de January de 2020
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  To practice any kind of sport, it is necessary to have a minimum of motor aptitude. Such motor fitness can be achieved with physical training involving repeated specific activities related to each sport. With long-term training, physiological changes and adaptations occur mainly in the motor and neurological systems, at the muscular level and in the central and peripheral nervous system. This process is known as motor learning.

  As we saw on our blog "Human motor learning and executive functions", in addition to the processes of muscle hypertrophy, proprioception improvement and neuroplasticity, human studies to investigate the motor learning sequence bring about the investigation of physical actions to cognition, especially neural mechanisms. A commonly used instrument in this type of investigation is Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), which allows you to measure cortical activation during dynamic movements such as walking and running or a task that requires sitting or relaxed surroundings such as playing piano and playing table tennis. This allows the monitoring of cerebral hemodynamic changes in different real-life contexts involving motor learning through the inference of changes in local oxy and deoxyhemoglobin concentration (in terms of neural activity). An example of a study that advises the occurrence of motor learning is the search rotor (RB) task (Figure on the side). It is a task where the participant attempts to chase a small disc on a rotating turntable and requires motor control of upper extremity proximal parts, including shoulder and elbow, and postural control for sitting. Knowing this, imagine being able to improve performance athletes with neuroscientific and technological knowledge. This is possible!
 
  As we have seen on our "Using eye tracking in high-performance sports to improve performance" and " Behavioral Studies in Basketball" blogs, a study involving equipment such as Eye-Tracking can be used to improve the performance of basketball players. A study using Eye-Tracking conducted in 2018 showed that from the observation of the strategies used in throwing by the athlete of the adult basketball team, it was noticed that she was looking at several points of the hoop at the time of the throw (Image below). Through the analysis of the obtained data, it was suggested that the athlete looked at a fixed point of the rim during the play. This made her free-throw performance increase from 56% (14/25) to 68.75% (11/16), with an impressive performance of 81.81% (9/11) in her first game after the implementation of this technique.
 Créditos da ilustração: William Mariotto, Ilustrações 3D: Jonatan Sarmento.

  In addition, as we saw in our blog "What does neuroscience have to say about soccer?", other work done with high-performance athletes from the base categories of one of the great Brazilian soccer clubs showed that in addition to these high-level athletes have a high development of motor coordination, as well as an executive functions. well developed, they had a low intelligence level. Dividing athletes by low (which was the majority), lower-middle, or upper-middle IQs, they found that these young athletes with overdeveloped executive functions have difficulties mainly related to fluency, with little vocabulary for various areas.

                  
 
  Knowing that good motor performance can be related to better or worse cognitive development, can cognitive training beyond motor further improve the performance of athletes in their respective sport? What may be the neurophysiological explanations for this? Can eye-tracking associated with this type of approach further favor motor performance in other sports? These questions only new research can answer.

 
          

To know more about this point, see our Hub "Sport & Motor Behavior" .

References:
 
[1] Balardin, Joana B., et al. "Imaging brain function with functional near-infrared spectroscopy in unconstrained environments." Frontiers in human neuroscience 11 (2017): 258.
[2] Hatakenaka, Megumi, et al. "Frontal regions involved in learning of motor skill—a functional NIRS study." Neuroimage 34.1 (2007): 109-116.
[3]Nambu, Isao, et al. "Detecting motor learning-related fnirs activity by applying removal of systemic interferences." IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems 100.1 (2017): 242-245.
[4] Wolpert, Daniel M., Zoubin Ghahramani, and J. Randall Flanagan. "Perspectives and problems in motor learning." Trends in cognitive sciences 5.11 (2001): 487-494.

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Autor:

Rodrigo Oliveira

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