ИСТИНА

The relations of attention skills and sport performance often discussed in sport science (Kluka & Knudson, 1997; Eccles et al., 2006; Vickers, 2007; Beauchamp et al., 2012, etc.). According to Neideffer’ theory (1976), we supposed that a wide focus of attention is important for ball, combat and extreme sports because efficiency of technical and tactical skills is closely related to ability of controlling different fast-moving events in visual space (personal movements, teammates or counterparts actions, etc.) Therefore, abilities to maintain focus of attention on different targets become a crucial component for sport performance (Rawat, 2014). The aim of the present study was to identify differences in multiple tracking objects ability depending on sport type. We assumed that athletes who didn’t have to do specific attention tasks (for example in some cyclic sports) could show the lowest level of this ability. 125 Russian athletes participated in research: ball sports (football (N=40), basketball (N=19)), combat sports (N=19: sambo, judo & taekwondo), extreme sports (rock-climbing, N=24) and cyclic sports (swimming, track and field, N=24). We measured athletes’ multiple object tracking ability via NeuroTracker (Faubert, 2012). The task was to follow 4 of the 8 moving objects in 3D-scene. Mann-Whitney test found no statistical differences in multiple object tracking ability between groups: football, basketball, rock-climbing and combat sports. In contrast, we found the significant differences between cyclic sport and a) football (p<0,001); b) basketball (p<0,05); c) combat sports (p<0,05); d) extreme sports (p<0,05). Effectiveness of visual processing is connected with sport type: athletes of ball, combat and extreme sports are more successful in multiple object tracking than cyclic sports. Thus, the hypothesis was confirmed. To date, based on the results we conducted the research was focused on development of multiple object tracking abilities of athletes.