Studies have reported that athletic conditioning or training may have neuropsychological benefits for adult athletes, including enhanced processing speed, executive function, and working memory and attention. However, others have reported that these benefits may be attenuated by an athlete’s level of exposure to repetitive, subconcussive head impacts, such as heading the ball in soccer. Neurocognitive dispersion, or intraindividual variability (IIV), has become an increasingly popular tool to assess neuropsychological performance in various clinical populations. Less dispersion is typically associated with more consistent and better overall performance (i.e., fewer lapses of reaction time and accuracy). However, few studies have utilized these measures in healthy young adults. The objective of this study was to determine if athletes and non-athletes exhibited different levels of neurocognitive dispersion on a battery of neuropsychological tasks. It was hypothesized that athletes would exhibit less neurocognitive dispersion compared to non-athletes, despite their exposure to repetitive subconcussive head impacts.

Division 1 varsity and club team university athletes (n = 74, Mage = 19.93, female = 55%), and non-athlete undergraduate students (N = 154, Mage = 20.12, female = 69%) completed a neuropsychological battery consisting of 13 cognitive tests. Outcomes for each test were converted to standard scores and combined for overall neuropsychological performance. Two measures of IIV, intraindividual standard deviation (ISD) and maximum discrepancy (MD), were calculated across all 13 cognitive tests for each participant. Intraindividual standard deviation was calculated by taking the standard deviation of the mean performance across each task for each participant. Maximum discrepancy was calculated by subtracted the lowest standard score from the highest standard score per participant across all 13 cognitive tests.

Controlling for the impact of premorbid functioning, depressive symptoms, and gender, an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) found significantly less ISD in athletes (M = 11.28, SD = 2.76) compared to non-athletes (M = 12.56, SD = 3.61) across all 13 neuropsychological tasks (η2 = 0.04, p = .004). Similarly, significantly lower MD scores were found in athletes (M = 40.25, SD = 11.14) compared to non-athletes (M = 44.69, SD = 14.07) across all 13 neuropsychological tasks (η2 = 0.03, p = .008). Post-hoc analyses revealed no significant differences when athletes were divided into contact and non-contact athletes.

Similar to prior findings that aerobic exercise may enhance cognitive performance, both contact and non-contact college athletes exhibited less neurocognitive dispersion (as measured by ISD and MD) compared to non-athlete college students. However, no significant differences were found between non-contact athletes and contact athletes (soccer players) who were exposed to repetitive subconcussive heading events. These findings suggest that athletic performance in college-aged athletes may lead to more consistent and therefore overall better neuropsychological performance despite exposure to repetitive subconcussive head impacts.