The Transcognitive Basketball Performance

Elite basketball performance is rooted in the complex interaction between cognitive, physical, physiological, technical, and nutritional domains. Contemporary research underscores the centrality of cognitive functions—including decision-making, attention regulation, and situational intelligence—within the high-paced and cognitively demanding environment of competitive basketball. These mental capacities are not isolated; rather, they are dynamically shaped by an athlete’s fitness level, physiological readiness, nutritional status, technical execution, and tactical knowledge. While studies have demonstrated the effects of mental fatigue on motor skills, the role of nutrition in supporting sustained focus and energy, and the necessity of physical conditioning for cognitive resilience, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of how these components function as a unified whole. Many traditional training and assessment methodologies continue to treat these attributes as separate, missing the nuanced interplay that defines peak athletic performance. Thus, developing integrative frameworks is imperative for both performance optimization and injury mitigation. This research Topic emphasis on motor performance, cognition–action coupling, training interventions, and psychophysiological determinants of sport expertise in ecological, applied contexts. We will prioritize studies that explicitly interrogate cognition–action coupling and mechanistic links between neural, perceptual, and motor processes in basketball-specific contexts, rather than general monitoring or wellness programs.

This Research Topic aims to advance the concept of transcognitive basketball performance, with a focus on illuminating how advanced cognitive skills—such as tactical anticipation, selective attention, and rapid decision-making—interact with physical, physiological, technical, and nutritional factors to shape outcomes on the court. The central objective is to foster a deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which cognitive processes and somatic states reciprocally influence basketball performance, particularly under high-demand and stressful conditions. Specifically, we seek investigations that test how decision quality, attentional control, and tactical anticipation emerge from interactions with task, environmental, and organismic constraints in representative basketball tasks (e.g., small-sided games, time-pressure scenarios). Key questions include: How can training interventions integrate multiple performance domains? Which paradigms best capture perception–action coupling and decision-making fidelity under perturbations (e.g., fatigue, crowd noise, schedule congestion)? What are the neurophysiological markers that underpin successful skill execution in fatigued or stressed states? In what ways does nutrition modulate both mental and physical endurance during competition? By exploring these and related issues through interdisciplinary approaches, the goal is to provide actionable insights that help coaches, practitioners, and athletes achieve sustained excellence.This topic bridges motor control, skill acquisition, sport cognition, and applied psychophysiology, with clear translational value for coaching and performance science. Priority will be given to designs that combine behavioral performance with neural and psychophysiological indices (e.g., EEG/ERP, fNIRS, HRV) in ecologically valid settings.

The range of this Research Topic is defined by its comprehensive, integrative focus on the determinants of elite basketball performance, explicitly targeting the synergy among cognitive, physiological, physical, technical, and nutritional domains. Submissions that primarily address general health, recovery management, sleep monitoring, or descriptive injury epidemiology without a clear cognition–movement mechanism are better suited to broader performance–health collections. Submissions should prioritize interdisciplinary perspectives while remaining relevant to basketball performance in training, match play, or talent development contexts. Emphasis is placed on mechanistic explanations and intervention studies that alter cognition–movement dynamics.

We welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Cognitive training, decision-making processes, and game intelligence in basketball (e.g., perception–action coupling, ecological dynamics, representative task design) with on-court transfer tests and decision fidelity metrics.
• The impact of mental fatigue and stress on physical and technical execution (including psychophysiological load, recovery, and resilience) focusing on causal links between psychophysiological load and skill execution/decision latency, beyond general fatigue monitoring.
• Neurophysiological mechanisms involved in skill acquisition and adaptation (EEG/ERP, fNIRS, HRV, neuromuscular measures, and their links to motor performance) integrating time-synchronized kinematics and neural signals during live or simulated game play.
• The effect of nutrition and hydration strategies on cognitive and physical resilience (fueling, micronutrients, and timing effects on decision-making and motor consistency) that directly test changes in cognitive control and perception–action timing during basketball-representative tasks (not general nutrition audits).
• Development and evaluation of integrative assessment or training models for basketball (multimodal monitoring, mixed-methods, longitudinal and in-situ designs) that manipulate constraints to improve decision speed–accuracy trade-offs and motor attunement.
• Practical case studies or theoretical frameworks that bridge multiple domains (coach–sport scientist collaborations; applied interventions in elite and developmental pathways) that specify testable mechanisms linking cognition and movement.
• Innovations in performance monitoring and analytics that encompass multidimensional factors (wearables, computer vision, microtechnology, and data fusion to capture cognition–movement interactions) that fuse tracking/computer vision with cognitive-state inference to quantify decision contexts, rather than purely descriptive workload metrics.
This collection is intentionally delimited to the cognition–movement–physiology interface in basketball to complement, not duplicate, broader topics such as sleep, recovery management, and general injury surveillance addressed elsewhere.