In literature nowadays, an almost unmanageable flood of cognitive tests exists. They range from scientifically proven to pure software products that do not meet scientific criteria. In the following, no general overview is given. However, selected methods which were developed in the last years at the Institute for Training Science and Sports Informatics and were used in studies and the practice are presented. Four laboratory tests and four field tests are also presented as examples.
In the following, four cognitive test procedures are presented. After the testing, the athletes received a summary of their test results compared to different sport-specific test subject groups (seefigure 10).
The attention window test (AWT) by Hüttermann, Memmert, Simons, and Bock (2013) can be used to assess the individual’s range of attention. During each test phase, players are instructed to fix a central point and try to detect a gray triangle within circle and square distractors. For several attempts, the target will appear at different distances from the attachment point (10, 20, and 30 degrees), along with one of eight equally disputed radial lines from a square in the center of the display (45-degree distance) (seefigure 11). This random display is shown for 12 ms, followed by a colored mask (100 ms). After the masking, the players are asked to indicate how many gray triangles they had just seen in the different locations, depending on the orientation of the objects. The participants must complete 180 attempts. This task measures how well people can handle objects far from fixation (Hüttermann, Simons,& Memmert, 2014). The dependent measure is the point distribution of the diagonal attention window and the division of the total value by the number of dimensions (i.e., three).
The established working memory span test of Conway, Kane, Bunting, Hambrick, Wilhelm, and Engle (2005) measures the athlete’s ability to draw attention to the task without being distracted by other thoughts. The processing task is to count certain forms between the distractors and then remember the counts for later memory recall. Each task contains randomly arranged dark blue circles, green circles, and dark blue squares (seefigure 12). The task is to count out loud the dark blue circles, and then announce the total number of circles at the end. After two to six tasks, a reminder mask appears in which the players have to fill in their memorized totals precisely in the order in which they were displayed (see Kane, Hambrick, Tuholski, Wilhelm, Payne,& Engle 2004, for a detailed description). The simplicity of this counting task permits it to be performed with almost any player. The margin score is a subtotal (see Conway et al. 2005) that represents the sum of all successfully recovered items—where a correctly retrieved item from a set of two items gets 2 points, and a correctly retrieved item from a set of six items gets 6 points—divided by the maximum possible score. The test consists of 15 attempts. The dependent measure is the evaluation of the correctly memorized objects in percent.
