The Ability to Maintain Attention during Visuomotor Task Performance in Handball Players and Non-Athletes

Abstract

One of the important aspects of attentional processes in sport performance is sustained attention during task execution. The objective of this study was to analyze the ability to maintain attention during a serial reaction time task performance in expert handball players (n = 12) and non-athletes (n = 12). Participants p erform a FitLight TrainerTM (Fitlight Sports Corp., Canada) test protocol configured by the PDA controller which consisted of 10 series of simple motor reaction task to visual stimuli appearing on 8 wireless light discs. Each of the 10 series included 22 reactions. Ability to maintain attention was determined by analyzing the variability in results during testing, e.g. the total time of test execution and the average reaction time to visual stimulus in each subsequent series. The main finding in our study was that Non-athletes in comparison to Athletes had: (1) longer total time of test execution; (2) longer reaction time; (3) and higher variability in results during task performance. The results indicate a higher level of ability to maintain attention in handball players.

Keywords

• sustained attention
• handball
• reaction time