Effects of Closed- and Open-Skills Sport Practice on Proactive and Reactive Motor Inhibition via a Mouse Response-Registration System

Purpose: Human sport performance is a showcase of skilled cognitive-motor control. A key component of cognitive functions employed in a variety of sport context-related situations is the inhibitory motor control, defined as the ability to retain ‘prepotent’ response tendency and suppress inappropriate ongoing actions. Recently, research focused on evaluating influences on cognitive function exerted by different sport categories. Indeed, to understand how sport experience modulate the cognitive functioning of athletes might have implications not only for talent identification and development in sport but also encourage specific disciplines as potential intervention for populations with cognitive deficits. In this study we investigated the effect of open- and closed-skills sport practice on proactive and reactive inhibition. To serve this goal we employed for the first time a behavioral method based on a mouse response-registration system. Methods: We compared inhibitory control across tennis players (n=15), swimmers (n=16) and sedentary non-athletic controls (n=16) for a total of 47 participants. Proactive and reactive inhibition was estimated by employing a non-sport-specific cued Go No-Go (GNG) and a Stop stop-signal task (SST), respectively, in which participants inhibited categorizing left/right arrows. For cued GNG, the accuracy rate in inhibiting action was estimated to assess proactive inhibitory performance; for SST, the Stop Signal Reaction Time (SSRT) was calculated to evaluate reactive inhibitory performance. Finally, the new proposed methodology gave the opportunity to explore whether the practice of sport would influence dynamic aspects of inhibitory control by introducing a one-shot and non-one-shot velocity profiles analysis. Results: Accuracy rate in inhibiting action during No-Go trials showed no differences between tennis players and swimmers or athletes and non-athletes. Moreover, SSRTs were significant shorter for the tennis players and swimmers compared to non-athletes. However, no differences between athletes of different sport categories were observed. Finally, in both cued GNG and SST, velocity profiles analysis evidenced a higher proportion of non-one-shot movements in No-Go/Stop conditions in athletes than non-athletes. Conclusions: Our findings confirmed that sport practice improves inhibitory motor control mechanisms. However, inhibitory functions do not benefit differently from different types of sport practice.