Long-term basketball training shapes cerebellar-frontal integration for enhanced cognitive control

In competitive sports, elite athletes demonstrate exceptional proficiency in resolving sensorimotor conflicts, exemplified by the basketball head-fake phenomenon. Whether long-term basketball training leads to adaptive cognitive control in athletes and the underlying neural mechanisms is still unclear. Using a spatial conflict task called Swimmy and functional magnetic resonance imaging, this study investigated the brain function of 50 basketball athletes and 55 gender- and age-matched healthy controls during the Swimmy tasks. Our findings revealed that basketball athletes showed distinct neurocognitive profiles between basketball athletes and non-athletes during the Swimmy task performance. Behaviorally, athletes showed better conflict resolution accuracy in incongruent trials despite similar reaction times, indicating enhanced inhibitory control. Neuroimaging revealed athlete-specific activation patterns: heightened right lingual gyrus and cerebellar lobule VI during congruent trials, while incongruent trials triggered left precuneus activation and reduced right middle frontal gyrus engagement. Athletes also exhibited attenuated left inferior parietal lobule responses in incongruent > congruent contrasts. Notably, Dynamic Causal Modeling identified that athletes exhibited reduced right Crus I→left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) connectivity versus controls, contrasting with enhanced bidirectional Crus II-IFG coupling. Crucially, stronger IFG→Crus II connectivity positively predicted incongruent trial accuracy in athletes. This athlete-specific connectivity-behavior relationship, absent in controls, indicates that long-term sport training is associated with distinct neural circuit configurations supporting cognitive control via cerebellar-frontal integration. This work contributes to our understanding of the neural correlates related to long-term sport training, particularly highlighting the cerebellum’s involvement in cognitive control. These findings inform our understanding of the cognitive benefits of long-term sport training and open up possibilities for targeted interventions that could enhance cognitive control in various populations, offering hope for future research and applications in cognitive enhancement.