Simonet, M., Nolan, D., Pocock, C., Gredin, V. and Runswick, O. R. (2025) Reassessing inhibitory control advantages in athletes: a comparison of football players, endurance athletes, and sedentary individuals using the stop-signal task. In: 11th Expertise and Skill Acquisition Network Conference, 10-11 September 2025, Brighton, U.K..
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Abstract
Inhibitory control (IC) involves suppressing unwanted actions and is crucial for adaptive behaviours. Recent interest in IC training across various domains, including sports, education, and rehabilitation, has demonstrated its potential for enhancing performance. This study aims to investigate the influence of football experience on IC expertise and whether extensive football practice leads to specific learning advantages in IC tasks compared to endurance athletes and sedentary people. We also explored the relationship between IC proficiency and different independent variables such as sporting expertise, hours of practice, sex or age. Nineteen football players, fourteen endurance athletes, and seventeen sedentary participants completed a 30-minute stop-signal task online. Preliminary results showed no significant differences in stop-signal reaction times between groups, nor significant associations between IC proficiency and the independent variables. These findings challenge the widely held assumption that open-skill sports inherently lead to superior IC abilities as measured by standard laboratory-based tasks. They contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting the need for methodological refinements in the stop-signal task (SST), such as sport-specific adaptations of the SST to provide more accurate insights into response inhibition performance within athletic contexts.
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