The role of Cognitive Performance analytics in Sport

Sport is becoming much more data-driven and teams, coaches, and brands want to look deeper look into an athlete’s cognitive performance. There are many fantastic systems available to track an athlete’s physical performance and manage their physical training load, but there are very few options when it comes to cognitive load monitoring. 

The brain is the most overlooked aspect of performance and without it we do not  function. The brain is responsible for everything. Without a fine-tuned brain performance does not exist. In order to track an athlete’s cognitive performance,  you need to be looking at more than one metric. In this article, we will cover 4  important metrics for cognitive performance. 

Currently, in the sports industry, there is a huge amount of hype around reaction  time but reaction time alone is just not enough to track cognitive performance or  cognitive fatigue. Below we will dive into each metric you should be measuring in  order to get a fully comprehensive picture of an athlete’s cognitive performance. 

Reaction Time 

Reaction Time is the amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus. This is  measured in milliseconds. 

Reaction time is highly variable. You can have two athletes with the same reaction  time but one athlete can be more consistent. Ask yourself, do you want a fast  athlete? Or a fast and consistent athlete? If your athletes cannot maintain fast,  correct decisions, over a long period of time, with a low variation, they will not be  reliable under pressure. This could cost you the game or championship. 

Speed 

Speed is a reciprocal transformation of reaction time and has been proven to be  more sensitive than simple reaction time to detect fatigue. 

“Transforming RTS to speed (i.e., the reciprocal of latency) normalizes the  distribution somewhat, reduces the effect of slow outliers, and therefore generally  maintains good power”(e.g., imam, 2006; Spencer & chase, 1996; c.f., Greenwald,  Nosek, & Banaji, 2003).

Speed will give you more detail about your athlete’s cognitive performance.  Knowing an athlete’s response speed is knowing what made up their final results.  Reaction Time is a surface measurement and Speed is a deeper insight. 

Rate of the correct score (RCS) 

Rate of the correct score (RCS) This score can be interpreted as the number of correct responses per second of activity. 

This is a fantastic measure to see the number of CORRECT responses per second  of activity. This gives the coach a solid number of how many correct decisions they  are making. This is an easy-to-understand metric for coaches and athletes.  

Variation 

The most important metric that must be looked at is variation. How consistent is  your athlete? Are they fast and consistent or fast and inconsistent? Athletes are highly skilled in their sport but the difference between winning or losing can come down to who makes better decisions faster. 

   

Coefficient of variation (CV) is a statistic used to measure the degree of variation  between testing trials in an individual athlete’s repeated measurements. More variation in data values means there is a larger gap between one data value and another. If the data values are all close together, the variation will be smaller.  Smaller variation means better consistency. 

For Example  

The below image illustrates that this athlete is performing quite well if you are just  looking at their Reaction Time, Speed, and RCS.  

They are ELITE.  

But when you look at their variation at the 40-minute mark onward they drastically  decrease in their performance. This means that the athlete is unable to sustain the  work rate. This example shows you that in a game situation this athlete’s cognitive  capacity has reduced and their performance is declining rapidly. They will begin to  respond more inconsistently when the pressure begins to mount. 

The last frontier of human performance is the athlete’s brain. Without looking at all the data points, you could be missing important information about your athlete’s progress and performance. SOMA NPT is designed for Sports training for which includes Brain Endurance Training, Cognitive Training, Eye Training Neurotechnology for athletes and high-performing individuals.