Rooyesh-e- Ravanshenasi Journal(RRJ)

Introduction: Many studies show that physical activities activity could prevent cognitive decline and may enhance frontal lobe activity. Thus، the main purpose of this article is to investigating the effect of physical activity on cognitive functions of  talented youth soccer players and amateur soccer players.

Method: statistical community in the present study involved all of the soccer players that play in Tabriz clubs. sixteen highly talented youth soccer players and sixteen age-matched amateur soccer players in the age range 18 to 25 years performed Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) for Assessment of cognitive flexibility and continuous performance test (CPT) for evaluating the inhibition and sustained attention.

Results: Results showed that talented youth soccer players scored highest on inhibition And sustained attention task (p<0.05). But there was no statistically significant difference between two groups on cognitive flexibility.

Conclusion: Results provide support for the prevailing notion that talented soccer players had higher inhibition and sustained attention ability that could be due to the fact that exercise and physical activity can positively impact cognitive functioning and as a result of that، talented soccer players due to their Proficiency in paying attention to the ball and Inhibition of Actions، perform better. there was also no statistically significant difference between two groups on cognitive flexibility that could be due to the intelligence differences between two group that is not considered in the present study.