Neurocognitive training for athletes: what transfers to the field, according to 51 studies

In brief. According to the 51 studies analyzed here, an athlete's neurocognitive training almost always improves the trained task. Transfer to the field appears mostly when the exercise keeps the information and the response of the sport (video, temporal occlusion, a dual task built into play); for generic cognitive tasks, no far transfer has been demonstrated. Updated November 3, 2026.

Hello to you, the movement professional,

Forty-three studies on commercial cognitive-training devices, and only one that checks the effect on a sporting task. That is the verdict of a 2018 systematic review: only seventeen looked for an effect beyond laboratory tests (Harris et al., 2018). The authors stay cautious: the lack of evidence stems, they write, from "a lack of experimental studies in the sporting field and a lack of experimental rigor", more than from convincing null results.

You see athletes go past in front of a tablet, a screen where spheres whizz around, or a wall of lights that come on at random. The test score goes up, and that score says little about the match. Let's separate what improves on the task, what carries over to a neighboring task and what reaches the game. What makes transfer go further?

Neurocognitive, perceptual-cognitive, cognitive training: what the words cover

Studies rarely use "neurocognitive" on its own. They speak of perceptual-cognitive training when the athlete learns to read information from their sport (the shooter's shoulder, the trajectory of a corner) in order to anticipate or decide, often facing a video cut at the critical instant: temporal occlusion. They speak of generic cognitive training when the task targets a capacity supposed to serve every sport: tracking several targets, inhibiting a response, reacting to a light. In between, cognitive-motor training grafts a mental task onto a physical exercise.

What sets them apart is the transfer of training to sport. A distinction is made between near transfer, to a task that resembles the one trained, and far transfer, to a different task, here the match (Fransen, 2024).

In 2018, Hadlow and colleagues proposed a framework for predicting transfer. Three factors interact: the perceptual function targeted, the match between the training stimulus and the sport's stimulus, the match between the response required and the real movement (Hadlow et al., 2018). Keep them at hand: they organize almost all the literature that follows.

Anticipation and decision-making: what experts have more of, and only in their own sport

Across 42 studies, experts pick up perceptual cues better, more accurately and faster, with fewer and longer fixations (Mann et al., 2007). In temporal occlusion, 100 studies put this advantage at g = 1.15; it does not carry over to any other sport, and the laboratory score is only weakly to moderately related to real performance (Song et al., 2025).

Picture a rugby winger sitting in front of filmed soccer penalties, cut just before the strike. Andrew and Causer gave this test to 216 athletes: only the good-level soccer players do better, the less experienced ones don't outdo the others (Andrew and Causer, 2022). In combat sports, the gap between experts and non-experts grows as the stimulus gets closer to a real fight (Zhang et al., 2022).

Gaze and laboratory tests capture only part of this advantage (Silva 2022, Ma 2026, van Maarseveen 2018). Can it be built?

Training anticipation in sport: video, temporal occlusion and instructions

A good share of the trials come from tennis. Recreational players trained with video, instructions and feedback on expert strategies anticipate better in the laboratory and on the court than placebo and control groups (Williams et al., 2002). In 27 randomized senior players, perceptual-cognitive training does better than a technique and movement program on the speed and accuracy of decisions in match situations (Caserta et al., 2007).

Soccer followed. Sixteen elite female players, twelve sessions of fifteen minutes of international match video: the gain carries over to pass, shot and dribble decisions on the field (Gabbett et al., 2008). Professional female players trained to read corners by progressive occlusion go from 54 to 68% correct predictions, and the authors describe better corners in matches as a suggested effect (Libreau and Benguigui, 2025). The goalkeeper has an analysis of his own: the goalkeeper's gaze.

How practice is organized matters too: random stroke order beats blocked order (Broadbent et al., 2015), and an order that follows the real rally beats random order (Broadbent et al., 2017), in decision speed on the court. Under pressure, explicit learning degrades (Smeeton et al., 2005), and in international badminton players, only training conducted under high anxiety keeps its accuracy on the anxiety-inducing test (Alder et al., 2016).

Feel the difference between guessing the direction of a shot on your own and knowing you have to watch the shoulder. In handball, in 60 novices, all the methods except the color cue hold at five months, and only implicit learning stays above controls under stress (Abernethy et al., 2012). On implicit learning, the literature contradicts itself: a 2002 trial found an implicit gain lost at 32 days (Farrow and Abernethy, 2002), whose reanalysis notes groups that were unequal at baseline and the largest mean gain in the placebo group (Jackson, 2003). How much of these gains comes down to simple familiarity with the test?

Meta-analyses of perceptual-cognitive training: a clearer effect in the laboratory than in real play

In team sports, perceptual-cognitive training improves laboratory performance with an effect of 1.51, and performance in real play with an effect of 0.65 (Zhu et al., 2024): less than half. For temporal occlusion alone, video and field tests do not differ, with publication bias unresolved (Müller et al., 2024).

Another meta-analysis asks the awkward question. Across 33 randomized trials of visual training on a digital medium, the effect on reaction time is 2.66 when the test resembles the training, 0.50 otherwise; for visual attention, 1.65 versus 0.07 (Guo et al., 2025). The authors read this as familiarity with the task more than a cognitive gain, which tempers their own effect of 0.85 on decision time, across 27 trials (Guo et al., 2025).

In soccer, a scoping review judges field interventions, small-sided games and nonlinear pedagogy, more convincing than laboratory ones (Machado et al., 2026); an earlier review already called for retention and transfer tests (Zhao et al., 2022). This triangle of performance, retention and transfer shows up everywhere: many trials measure the first, few measure the other two.

Generic cognitive tasks, screens and lights: the task improves, the sport waits

The null results look alike. In 43 expert volleyball players, eight weeks of multiple object tracking in 3D improve the task (ηp² = 0.70) and two neighboring cognitive tests, nothing on a volleyball-specific block test, taken in the laboratory (Fleddermann et al., 2019). In 62 young players at a professional academy, the same training as a dual task improves the tracking score, with no transfer to the attention test or to the small-sided game, while a coauthor is linked to the company that sells the tool (Romeas et al., 2025). The detail is in the analysis of multiple object tracking in 3D.

Six months of light stimuli in 38 young soccer players: the trained group's simple reaction time drops by 11.8%, but the groups do not differ on most measures, and the authors conclude that the program adds nothing to usual training (Theofilou et al., 2022). In 27 high-level épée fencers, both groups improve on the four motor reaction time tests (Di Martino et al., 2024). The 1997 and 2001 trials already said so: progress, no greater than that of test familiarity (Wood and Abernethy, 1997; Abernethy and Wood, 2001).

Three trials go the other way. In 23 junior tennis players, cognitive training in virtual reality and on a tablet comes with a UTR rating up 0.5 points versus 0.02 in controls, in a pilot study to be replicated according to its four authors, all linked to the company that sells the program (Anguera et al., 2025). Training inhibitory control improves an antisaccade task, then a tennis task under high pressure, in the laboratory (Ducrocq et al., 2016). In 25 young hockey players, hockey-specific cognitive training improves the hockey version of an inhibition test, nothing in the generic versions (Heilmann and Schubert, 2025). The gain lodges where the exercise resembles the sport. And when the cognitive task enters the physical exercise itself?

Cognitive-motor dual task: when decision-making enters the exercise

Grafting on a cognitive task is not enough. In 42 amateur soccer players, adding multiple object tracking to six weeks of reactive agility brings nothing more, and the Loughborough passing test does not move in any group (Friebe et al., 2024).

When the cognitive task is housed inside the sport's exercise, the specific tests move. In 40 highly trained handball players, six weeks of sessions taken out of usual training improve a defensive test specific to handball (Jedziniak et al., 2026). Dribbling and passing improve in 32 soccer players under 16 (Ramírez Lucas et al., 2025), and the specific tests in 24 semi-professional basketball players who solve cognitive tasks while dribbling (Lucia et al., 2021). In 21 young soccer players, on the other hand, small-sided games improve cognition as much as speed and agility work (Trecroci et al., 2022).

The youth basketball review sorts these results: the most consistent effects come from cognitive-motor training, on measures close to the task, with retention and transfer to the match remaining rare and inconsistent (Li et al., 2026). None of these trials measured a match.

Near transfer, far transfer: what carries over to the field, what stays in the test

Put end to end, these trials draw a gradient. On the trained task, almost everything improves. On a neighboring task, sometimes: two cognitive tests in the volleyball players, the antisaccade, the hockey version of the inhibition test. In the field, the effect appears when the exercise keeps the sport's information and response: game decisions after match video, anticipation on the court, a defensive test in handball. The match itself is rarely measured: corners in competition, a pilot's UTR rating, and in baseball, league statistics and level reached five years later after adaptive batting in a virtual environment (Gray, 2017).

The null results share a trait: a generic task, far from the sport's stimulus and response. For strobe training, neurofeedback and executive functions, Fransen (2024) judges the promises of far transfer unsupported. For Renshaw and colleagues, "brain training" offers at best a general transfer of basic processes, without the specificity of the sport's real behavior (Renshaw et al., 2018). This critique comes from ecological dynamics, that of the constraints-led approach and of representative learning design. Broadbent and colleagues draw design principles from it: perception-action coupling, contextual interference, context information (Broadbent et al., 2015).

Technology is no exception to the rule. In basketball, virtual-reality video transfers to the field even to actions never seen, the screen only to trained actions (Pagé et al., 2019); in Australian football, two-dimensional video does better on the field than 360-degree video (Hoyne et al., 2026). The debate continues in the article on virtual reality and sports decision-making.

A neurophysiological lead is circulating. The two-visual-systems hypothesis separates a ventral stream and a dorsal stream: the first serves recognition, the second reaches the posterior parietal cortex and serves the motor planning of the movement under way, so that the field would rely on different information than off-field tests. Its central claims are increasingly debated (Mann et al., 2021): it remains a reading framework.

Links between the studies

No shared sample appears in the abstracts. Several trials come from the same teams (Broadbent, Causer, Ford and Williams in tennis; Abernethy and Wood; Guo and Yuan), and the meta-analysis abstracts do not list their trials: it is impossible to say which ones count the same trial twice.

Neurocognitive training: the solid, the debated, the speculative

Established, across several concordant meta-analyses and trials: experts anticipate and decide better, in their own sport only; perceptual-cognitive training improves the trained task, more in the laboratory than in real play; generic tasks (object tracking, lights, visual programs) do not transfer to sport in the controlled trials analyzed here, apart from a pilot of 23 tennis players.

Debated: the size of the transfer from specific training, measured on field tests more than in matches; the superiority of implicit learning, challenged by a reanalysis; the contribution of virtual reality versus 2D video; cognitive-motor gains, clear on specific tests, still absent from the match. Extrapolated: any competition gain attributed to a generic cognitive task, any improvement of the "brain" in general, any optimal dose.

Three reservations weigh on the whole. Test familiarity inflates part of the published effects (Guo 2025). Sample sizes are small: a median of 33 participants, across the 21 cited trials whose abstract gives the number. And large preregistered trials are missing (Li 2026).

Our prediction, which research may refute: the first preregistered trial to compare, at equal duration and level, a generic cognitive task and an anticipation task drawn from the sport, measured in matches and in retention, will find a match gain for the second only. If the generic task does just as well, our reading of transfer is wrong and we will correct it.

Before training an athlete's perception: medical referral

If your athlete reports double vision, persistent blur, headaches during effort or dizziness, visual training waits. They see an ophthalmologist first, then an orthoptist in France, or an optometrist in Switzerland or the United States. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is a complement to a care pathway, never a substitute for it.

LabO RNP works with optometrists; the curriculum was built with them.

Perceiving, deciding, acting: a single sensorimotor loop

The eyes are a point of entry. What LabO RNP teaches is the whole sensorimotor loop: how what the athlete perceives organizes what they do. These studies show it in their own way: transfer stops where perception detaches from the movement. The oculomotor exercises in the warm-up place vision within a session, the map of the evidence in sports vision among the other families of visual training. Reading these studies is free; deciding what you do with them with your athlete takes a framework, and the Introduction to RNP lays its foundations.

Before choosing cognitive training: sourced answers

What is neurocognitive training in athletes?

Three families: perceptual-cognitive training teaches reading information from the sport to anticipate or decide, often on video; generic cognitive training targets attention, inhibition or target tracking outside the sport; cognitive-motor training adds a mental task to a physical exercise. Their transfer differs markedly.

Does cognitive training improve match performance?

The match is rarely measured. A meta-analysis of 22 studies finds an effect of 1.51 in the laboratory versus 0.65 in real play (Zhu et al., 2024). For generic tasks, controlled trials find no transfer either to sport tests or to play (Fleddermann 2019, Romeas 2025, Theofilou 2022), apart from a tennis pilot to be replicated, signed by authors linked to the program's publisher (Anguera 2025).

What is the difference between near transfer and far transfer?

Near: progress on a task that resembles the one trained, another attention test for example. Far: progress on a different task, such as the match. After training in 3D object tracking, 84 participants showed neither (Harris et al., 2020).

What is temporal occlusion?

A video cut just before the strike, the shot or the serve: the athlete predicts what follows from the opponent's cues. Occlusion training produces a large effect, on video and on the field alike (Müller et al., 2024), which does not carry over to another sport (Song et al., 2025).

Do tasks on screens or lights make you react better in the field?

Reaction time on the test often improves, and so does that of control groups. Six months of light stimuli in 38 young soccer players do no better than usual training (Theofilou et al., 2022), and across 33 trials, the effect grows when the test resembles the training (Guo et al., 2025).

Do you need medical advice before visual or cognitive training?

At the slightest visual signal, double vision, persistent blur, headaches during effort or dizziness, the athlete sees an ophthalmologist first, then an orthoptist or an optometrist depending on the country. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is a complement to a care pathway, never a substitute for it.

A task always improves where it is trained, and the match only recovers it if it finds its information and its movement there.

👉 I want to work on decision-making where it is made: in the movement.

By the LabO RNP team

Method. Consolidated inventory of 1,275 studies on athletes' vision (PubMed and our reading notes, November 3, 2026). A keyword filter (perceptual-cognitive, neurocognitive, executive functions, reaction time, lights, temporal occlusion) retains 696, of which 243 interventions, reviews or articles without original data, studies without transfer included. 51 are analyzed here, for their direct link with transfer. Excluded: references without an accessible abstract, two trials with inconsistent or off-topic figures, concussion. Identifiers verified on PubMed on November 3, 2026.

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