Abstract

CARREIRO, Luiz Renato Rodrigues; FERREIRA, Iara Ribeiro  and  MACHADO-PINHEIRO, Walter. Comparing performance of volleyball players and non sport practing people on volluntary and automatic orienting visual attention tasks: an exploratory study. Psicol. teor. prat. [online]. 2009, vol.11, n.2, pp. 38-49. ISSN 1516-3687.

Attention is the selection of information to improve central nervous system functioning. In this study, reaction times (RT) of 6 volleyball players and 6 non sports practitioners were compared during voluntary and automatic orienting of attention tasks. In Experiment I (voluntary) a central fixation point (FP) appeared and after 700 ms a central cue (valid, invalid or neutral) indicating to the left or to the right. After 300, 500 or 800 ms the target flashed. In Experiment II (automatic), after 700 ms a peripheral cue appeared and after 100 or 800 ms the target appeared on the same or the opposite cue position. Subjects responded by pressing a joystick key. Median RT for each condition were used in Anova. The analysis of Experiment I demonstrated that volleyball players were faster than non sports practitioners (p < 0.05), differently of Experiment II (p = 0.36). These results indicate that volleyball players had better performance on voluntary attentional tasks.

Keywords : Attention; Reaction time; Automatic orienting; Voluntary orienting; Volleyball.

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