We are still lacking strong evidence that such abilities represent fundamental perceptual-cognitive abilities that would be expressed in laboratory measures void of social or contextual content 2. The superior abilities of high-level athletes for sports specific and socially realistic scenes both correspond to stimuli to which athletes have been extensively exposed throughout their lifespan. This is further supported by a recent study showing that athletes may be superior to non-athletes for processing socially realistic multitasking crowd scenes involving pedestrians crossing streets 11. This task is recognized as a critical and fundamental ability of social relevance 7 and is a very strong dynamic cue that can be used for collision avoidance 8 and anticipate opponents' movements in sports 9, 10. Biological motion perception involves the visual systems' capacity to recognize complex human movements when they are presented as a pattern of a few moving dots. One of the areas identified in the athlete brain as different from controls was the superior temporal sulcus (STS), which plays a particular role in socially relevant stimuli 5 and biological motion perception 6. What makes elite athletes so special? Do brains of athletes anatomically and functionally differ from non-athletes and does this difference relate to performance level? A recent paper showed that high-level athletes have increased cortical thickness in a few areas of the brain and that this increased anatomical volume is correlated with the level of athletic training 4. This gives us an insight as to what is so special about the elite athletes' mental abilities, which allows them to express great prowess in action.
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This demonstrates that a distinguishing factor explaining the capacities of professional athletes is their ability to learn how to process complex dynamic visual scenes. We trained 308 observers on a complex dynamic visual scene task void of context and motor control requirements 3 and demonstrate that professionals as a group dramatically differ from high-level amateur athletes, who dramatically differ from non-athlete university students in their capacity to learn such stimuli. When directly assessing whether such experience-related abilities correspond to fundamental and non-specific cognitive laboratory measures such as processing speed and attention, studies have shown moderate effects leading to the conclusion that their special abilities are context-specific 2. Evidence suggests that an athlete's sports-related perceptual-cognitive expertise is a crucial element of top-level competitive sports 1.
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