In the world of athletics, there has been a significant increase of awareness and concern around concussions. With contact sports, athletes are vulnerable to sports-related concussions of varying degrees. Athletic trainers are very sensitive when it comes to diagnosing a concussion, given that any injury to the brain is substantial and should not be overlooked. As an athlete myself, I have witnessed many teammates experience concussions, who have not been able to participate in any sort of physical activity. If concussions have such an impact on an individual\u2019s athletics, one may suspect that such repercussions extend to other aspects of an individual\u2019s life. This article further investigates the impact of sports-related head contacts on working memory capacity.<\/p>\n
Working Memory refers to a short-term store that is relevant to the performance of a cognitive task in an activated state. Working memory is crucial to overall cognitive ability and requires a level of attention that ensures memory will be maintained in spite of interference or distractions. Working memory becomes important for an athlete\u2019s optimal performance and physical safety because he or she must focus his\/her attention on the game and likewise, maintain task relevant information during distracting events that happen on the field.<\/p>\n
Mayers et. al (2011) created an experiment in order to measure working memory capacity among a group of collegiate athletes and to compare WMC of athletes competing in head-contact-prone sports with individuals who are unsusceptible to repeated head contacts. This study differed form previous studies on concussion in that it focused on the relationship between a history of and\/or propensity to athletic concussion in relation to current WMC function. Mayers et al. (2011) an automated operation span (AOSPAN) test to compare WMC between: student athletes competing in head-contact-prone sports (football, soccer)- HC cohort; student athletes competing in non-head-contact-prone sports (baseball, softball, volleyball, swimming, and track)- NHC cohort; and non-athlete students. Their sample of collegiate athletes was selected from American University.<\/p>\n
The AOSPAN administered presented the subjects with a series of simple mathematical problems. As soon as the problem was solved, the computer generated a brief presentation of a letter on the computer screen. After a sequence of math problems, which generated a subsequent series of letters, the subject was prompted to correctly submit the viewed letters in order. This was used to test each subjects WMC under the assumption that working memory was required to alternate between math and memory portions of the task. Higher scores indicated better WMC. The subjects were also asked to provide information regarding their history of diagnosed concussions in order to asses the possible effect of past sports-related head injuries on current WMC.<\/p>\n
Mayers et. al found that there were no significant differences in AOSPAN scores, and therefore WMC, between head-contact-prone athletes, non-head-contact prone athletes, and non-athletes as they had suspected. What they did find was that AOSPAN scores were higher in athletes that played football and volleyball because the working memory demands of these two sports are the highest. Football and Volleyball are the two sports that use coded verbal signals that are \u201ccalled\u201d during each offensive and defensive sequence and may be changed at any moment. This requires a certain level of attention and demands the use of working memory in order to perform the proper movement as a contribution to the overall play.<\/p>\n
It is obvious from this article that working memory is pertinent to athletic competition. While the findings of the effects of concussions on working memory capacity showed no significance, it is important to recognize the difficulty that arises when investigating concussions. It is difficult to find a large sample size given that only so many people have been diagnosed with concussions, in addition to the fact that concussions have recently come to the forefront of awareness. Additionally, the severity of each concussion varies among individuals and consequently the effects on WMC may only be significant at a certain level of severity. Another issue with this experiment in particular is that most of the subjects were studied months to years after sustaining their injuries, and as a result any healing may take away from identifying working memory consequences.<\/p>\n
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Mayers, Lester B. et al (2011). Working memory capacity among collegiate student athletes: Effects of sport-related head contacts, concussions, and working memory demands. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.<\/i> Pleasantville, NY: Psychology Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the world of athletics, there has been a significant increase of awareness and concern around concussions. With contact sports, athletes are vulnerable to sports-related concussions of varying degrees. Athletic trainers are very sensitive when it comes to diagnosing a concussion, given that any injury to the brain is substantial and should not be overlooked. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80215],"tags":[129793,130378],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}