ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586944
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Cognitive Era in Sports Performance: Mental Fatigue, Cognitive Training, Sleep and Psychological Ergogenic Substances-Volume IIView all 4 articles
Increasing ecological validity in mental fatigue researcha Footbonaut study
Provisionally accepted
- 1Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
- 2TSG Research Lab gGmbH, Zuzenhausen, Germany
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Past studies have mainly used Stroop tasks to induce mental fatigue in soccer.However, due to the non-sport-specificity of these tasks, their transferability to the real-life effects of mental fatigue in soccer have been questioned. To address this methodological issue, we developed two different versions of a soccer passing task via the so-called Footbonaut: a mentally more demanding decision-making and inhibition task in the experimental condition, and a mentally less demanding standard task of the Footbonaut in the control condition. The study's aim was to investigate the effects of the two different versions of the Footbonaut task on cognitive and soccer-specific performance. A randomised, counterbalanced experimental within-subjects design was employed (N = 27). Participants showed significantly worse soccer-specific performance in the experimental condition compared to the control condition. No corresponding effects were revealed in cognitive performance.Study limitations and mechanisms why cognitive performance was not negatively affected are being discussed.
Keywords: Mental Fatigue, mental effort, Technical performance, cognitive performance, Soccer, team sport
Received: 03 Mar 2025; Accepted: 30 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Weiler, Ennigkeit, Spielmann and Englert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Helena Weiler, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
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