517 – Still No Evidence for the Transfer of Generalized Perceptual-Cognitive Training to Sports Performance

·23 min·2 clips

Rob Gray reviews a follow-up study that fails to replicate evidence for generalized perceptual-cognitive training in sports.

Rob Gray introduces the episode by stating his long-standing skepticism of generalized perceptual-cognitive training, such as Neurotracker, which uses non-sport-specific stimuli like moving dots on a screen. He outlines three main problems: perception-action decoupling, lack of affordance-specifying information, and unrepresentative task constraints. Gray references a 2016 study by Romeas et al. that claimed transfer benefits but had methodological flaws like small sample size and unblinded raters. He shares a personal anecdote about being overly critical of that study at a conference, leading to an apology. Gray then praises the authors for conducting a follow-up study with improved design, including 62 participants, a control group, blinded raters, and a biological motion element. The training involved 5 weeks of standard Neurotracker and 5 weeks of a combined task with point-light figures of passing. Results showed very near transfer (improvement on Neurotracker itself) but no near transfer to another cognitive test (SVAQ) and no far transfer to soccer performance measures. A two-year follow-up also found no link between training and competition level. Gray concludes that generalized training lacks evidence and is not an effective use of practice time, suggesting sport-specific methods are better.

As heard by us

A careful review asks whether NeuroTracker-style cognitive drills really transfer to soccer performance.

Rob Gray gives generalized perceptual-cognitive training a firmer test by walking through a follow-up study that does not reproduce the hoped-for transfer from NeuroTracker work to soccer performance.

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Why you'd press play

You want to know whether computer-based perceptual training survives contact with the soccer field.

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