Tennis training enhances blindfolded navigation in children and adults

A growing body of research suggests that sports training enhances high-level cognitive functions, including sensory perception, sensorimotor skills, executive control, memory, attention, and processing speed. However, it is still unclear the extent to which the improvement in sensorimotor skills can be generalized to new contexts, especially in children. We examined the effects of tennis training on walking distance using the blind walking task (viewing targets and then walking blindfolded). Unlike reaching a ball while looking at it in lit environments and familiar space during tennis training, our blind walking task required looking at an object at unfamiliar distances, and then walking to its location with eyes blindfolded - a novel context in stark contrast with the tennis training environment. Performance was measured through signed errors, absolute errors, and the correlation between walked distance and target distance. Tennis-trained children (age: 9.34 ± 1.82 years old) showed lower absolute errors and stronger correlations than controls, indicating reduced noise and enhanced sensorimotor consistency. Tennis-trained adults (age: 22.70 ± 3.75 years old) demonstrated improved correlations without error reduction, suggesting training primarily enhanced sensorimotor alignment. As blind walking requires integrating visual-proprioceptive information to form internal sensorimotor representations, our findings suggest that tennis training improves distance-guided action, probably by modifying the fundamental sensorimotor model, so that it can transfer to completely different contexts, which indicates that sports training can be a viable cognitive training tool.