Elite sport often looks like a test of speed, strength and technical skill. Yet some of the most decisive moments in high-level competition unfold too quickly to be explained by physical ability alone.
Consider Canadian hockey superstar Connor McDavid’s overtime goal at the 4 Nations Face-Off against the United States last February. The puck was on his stick for only a fraction of a second, the other team’s defenders were closing in and he still somehow found the one opening no one else saw.
As professional hockey players return to the ice at the Milan-Cortina Olympics, Canadians can expect more moments like this. Increasingly, research suggests these moments are better understood not as just physical feats, but also as cognitive ones.
A growing body of research suggests a group of abilities known as perceptual-cognitive skills are key differentiators. This is the mental capacity to turn a blur of sights, sounds and movements into split-second decisions.
These skills allow elite athletes to scan a chaotic scene, pick out the right cues and act before anyone else sees the opportunity. In short, they don’t just move faster, but they also see smarter.
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How athletes manage visual chaos
One way researchers study these abilities is through a task known as multiple-object tracking, which involves keeping tabs on a handful of moving dots on a screen while ignoring the rest. Multiple-object tracking is a core method I use in my own research on visual attention and visual-motor co-ordination.
Multiple-object tracking taxes attention, working memory and the ability to suppress distractions. These are the same cognitive processes athletes rely on to read plays and anticipate movement in real time.
Unsurprisingly, elite athletes reliably outperform non-athletes on this task. After all, reading plays, tracking players and anticipating movement all depend on managing visual chaos.
There is, however, an important caveat. Excelling at multiple-object tracking will not suddenly enable someone to anticipate a play like McDavid or burst past a defender like Marie-Philip Poulin, captain of the Canadian women’s hockey team. Mastering one narrow skill doesn’t always transfer to real-world performance. Researchers often describe this limitation as the “curse of specificity.”
This limitation raises a deeper question about where athletes’ mental edge actually comes from. Are people with exceptional perceptual-cognitive abilities drawn to fast-paced sports, or do years of experience sharpen it over time?
Evidence suggests the answer is likely both.
Born with it or trained over time?
Elite athletes, radar operators and even action video game players — all groups that routinely track dynamic, rapidly changing scenes — consistently outperform novices on perceptual-cognitive tasks.
At the same time, they also tend to learn these tasks faster, pointing to the potential role of experience in refining these abilities.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov
What seems to distinguish elite performers is not necessarily that they take in more information, but that they extract the most relevant information faster. This efficiency may ease their mental load, allowing them to make smarter, faster decisions under pressure.
My research at McMaster University seeks to solve this puzzle by understanding the perceptual-cognitive skills that are key differentiators in sport, and how to best enhance them.
This uncertainty around how to best improve perceptual-cognitive skills is also why we should be cautious about so-called “brain training” programs that promise to boost focus, awareness or reaction time.
The marketing is often compelling, but the evidence for broad, real-world benefits is far less clear. The value of perceptual-cognitive training hasn’t been disproven, but it hasn’t been tested rigorously enough in real athletic settings to provide compelling evidence. To date, though, tasks that include a perceptual element such as multiple-object tracking show the most promise.
Training perceptual-cognitive skills
Researchers and practitioners still lack clear answers about the best ways to train perceptual-cognitive skills, or how to ensure that gains in one context carry over to another. This doesn’t mean cognitive training is futile, but it does mean we need to be precise and evidence-driven about how we approach it.
Research does, however, point to several factors that increase the likelihood of real-world transfer.
Training is more effective when it combines high cognitive and motor demands, requiring rapid decisions under physical pressure, rather than isolated mental drills. Exposure to diverse stimuli matters as well, as it results in a brain that can adapt, not just repeat. Finally, training environments that closely resemble the game itself are more likely to produce skills that persist beyond the training session.
The challenge now is translating these insights from the laboratory into practical training environments. Before investing heavily in new perceptual-cognitive training tools, coaches and athletes need to understand what’s genuinely effective and what’s just a high-tech placebo.
For now, this means treating perceptual-cognitive training as a complement to sport-specific training, not as a substitute. Insights will also come from closer collaborations between researchers, athletes and coaches.
There is however, support for incorporating perceptual-cognitive tasks as an assessment of “game sense” to inform scouting decisions.
The real secret to seeing the game differently, then, is not just bigger muscles or faster reflexes. It’s a sharper mind, and understanding how it works could change how we think about performance, both on and off the ice.
