Fang Wenxuan, Qi Yapeng, Wang Yihan, Li Xinwei, Du Xiaoxia, Shao Bin
School of Athletic Performance, Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, 200438, China.
Shanghai Key Lab of Human Performance, Shanghai University of sport, Shanghai, China.
BMC Sports Sci Med Rehabil. 2025 Aug 28;17(1):253. doi: 10.1186/s13102-025-01281-5.
In competitive sports, elite athletes demonstrate exceptional proficiency in resolving sensorimotor conflicts, exemplified by the basketball head-fake phenomenon. Whether long-term basketball training leads to adaptive cognitive control in athletes and the underlying neural mechanisms is still unclear.
Using a spatial conflict task called Swimmy and functional magnetic resonance imaging, this study investigated the brain function of 50 basketball athletes and 55 gender- and age-matched healthy controls during the Swimmy tasks.
Our findings revealed that basketball athletes showed distinct neurocognitive profiles between basketball athletes and non-athletes during the Swimmy task performance. Behaviorally, athletes showed better conflict resolution accuracy in incongruent trials despite similar reaction times, indicating enhanced inhibitory control. Neuroimaging revealed athlete-specific activation patterns: heightened right lingual gyrus and cerebellar lobule VI during congruent trials, while incongruent trials triggered left precuneus activation and reduced right middle frontal gyrus engagement. Athletes also exhibited attenuated left inferior parietal lobule responses in incongruent > congruent contrasts. Notably, Dynamic Causal Modeling identified that athletes exhibited reduced right Crus I→left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) connectivity versus controls, contrasting with enhanced bidirectional Crus II-IFG coupling. Crucially, stronger IFG→Crus II connectivity positively predicted incongruent trial accuracy in athletes.
This athlete-specific connectivity-behavior relationship, absent in controls, indicates that long-term sport training is associated with distinct neural circuit configurations supporting cognitive control via cerebellar-frontal integration. This work contributes to our understanding of the neural correlates related to long-term sport training, particularly highlighting the cerebellum’s involvement in cognitive control. These findings inform our understanding of the cognitive benefits of long-term sport training and open up possibilities for targeted interventions that could enhance cognitive control in various populations, offering hope for future research and applications in cognitive enhancement.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13102-025-01281-5.
在竞技体育中，精英运动员在解决感觉运动冲突方面表现出非凡的能力，篮球中的头部假动作现象就是例证。长期的篮球训练是否会导致运动员产生适应性认知控制及其潜在的神经机制仍不清楚。
本研究使用一种名为“Swimmy”的空间冲突任务和功能磁共振成像，调查了50名篮球运动员和55名年龄和性别匹配的健康对照者在“Swimmy”任务期间的脑功能。
我们的研究结果显示，在执行“Swimmy”任务时，篮球运动员与非运动员之间表现出不同的神经认知特征。在行为上，尽管反应时间相似，但运动员在不一致试验中表现出更好的冲突解决准确性，表明抑制控制增强。神经影像学显示了运动员特有的激活模式：在一致试验中右侧舌回和小脑小叶VI激活增强，而不一致试验则引发左侧楔前叶激活并减少右侧额中回参与。在不一致>一致对比中，运动员左侧顶下小叶反应也减弱。值得注意的是，动态因果模型显示，与对照组相比，运动员右侧小脑中脚→左侧额下回（IFG）的连接性降低，而小脑中脚II与IFG的双向耦合增强形成对比。至关重要的是，更强的IFG→小脑中脚II连接性正向预测了运动员在不一致试验中的准确性。
这种对照组中不存在的特定于运动员的连接-行为关系表明，长期运动训练与通过小脑-额叶整合支持认知控制的独特神经回路配置有关。这项工作有助于我们理解与长期运动训练相关的神经关联，特别强调了小脑在认知控制中的作用。这些发现为我们理解长期运动训练的认知益处提供了信息，并为可能增强各人群认知控制的靶向干预开辟了可能性，为未来认知增强的研究和应用带来了希望。
在线版本包含可在10.1186/s13102-025-01281-5获取的补充材料。
