595 Elite Athletes Tested: The “Open-Skill Sports Build Better Brains” Story Just Got More Complicated

If you have read about sport and the brain, you have encountered the open-skill versus closed-skill distinction. Open-skill sports — table tennis, badminton, fencing — force you to react to an unpredictable opponent. Closed-skill sports — swimming, running, gymnastics routines — let you execute a pre-planned movement in a stable environment. The popular narrative is seductive and simple: open-skill sports demand constant real-time decision-making, so they build sharper brains.

A new study published in the European Journal of Sport Science put that narrative to its most demanding test yet — and the results are a masterclass in why the details matter.

The Study

Researchers at the German Sport University Cologne, led by Laura Will and including perceptual-cognition researchers Linus Musculus and Markus Raab, assembled one of the largest cognitive datasets on elite athletes ever collected. A total of 595 junior and senior national squad athletes (mean age 18.01, 255 female, 340 male) from eight sports completed identical standardized batteries measuring five cognitive functions: processing speed, attention, working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility.

The eight sports spanned the full range of the classic taxonomies: table tennis, basketball, volleyball, and ice hockey as open-skill or interceptive sports; artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, and trampoline as closed-skill sports; and modern pentathlon as a hybrid.

Then came the statistically rigorous part. Instead of simply comparing group averages and declaring winners, the team used formal model comparison — Akaike and Bayesian Information Criteria — to ask whether taxonomy-based classifications (open versus closed, strategic-static-interceptive, participant classifications, and multidimensional frameworks) explained the cognitive data better than a null model with no structure at all, or than a model treating each sport as its own entity.

What They Found

The headline result deflates the tidy taxonomy story. Across attention, working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, none of the taxonomy-based models improved fit relative to the null model. The differences were negligible (all model contrasts fell below the accepted thresholds for substantive interpretation, with differences in AIC under 3). Knowing whether an athlete played an “open” or “closed” sport told you essentially nothing about their cognitive profile.

Only processing speed showed meaningful structure — and it was structured by individual sport, not by taxonomy (AIC = 4194.8 for the single-discipline model versus 4203.6 for the null model, a difference of 8.8). A one-way ANOVA across the eight disciplines confirmed a significant, moderate-sized effect on processing speed, F(7, 559) = 9.77, p < 0.001, with an effect size of eta-squared = 0.109.

Where Table Tennis Landed

Here the study delivers genuinely interesting specifics. In post-hoc comparisons corrected for all 28 pairwise tests, table tennis players (mean standardized processing-speed score 109.70, SD 9.13) scored significantly higher than ice hockey players (104.17, SD 10.41), p = 0.048, d = -0.57. Basketball players posted the highest mean (115.36, SD 10.37), significantly ahead of artistic gymnastics (d = 0.95), rhythmic gymnastics (d = 0.88), ice hockey (d = 1.16), modern pentathlon (d = 0.79), and volleyball (d = 0.64). Table tennis sat in the upper-middle of the pack — ahead of the closed-skill gymnastics disciplines in raw means, but not separated from them by the corrected statistics.

And when the researchers converted processing-speed norms into IQ-referenced values using the standard conversion tables, the entire elite sample averaged 112.78 (SD 15.28) against the population mean of 100 — a large and highly significant difference, t(566) = 19.91, p < 0.001, d = 0.836. Every sport’s athletes, on average, processed information faster than the general population.

Crucially, none of these discipline-level differences would have been predicted by any of the taxonomies — which is precisely the point. The classifications that dominate public discussion of sport and cognition would have obscured, not revealed, the actual pattern.

Why This Matters

The study is not an attack on exercise or on table tennis. The claim under scrutiny is narrower and more specific: that sorting sports into cognitive categories is a reliable shortcut for predicting who has which mental advantages. On that claim, the evidence came back negative.

The context explains why this matters so much. A widely cited 2009 meta-analytic review by Michelle Voss and colleagues in Applied Cognitive Psychology — drawing on 20 studies of expert athletes — concluded that athletes showed Expert advantages on measurement of processing speed, with the largest effects in so-called interceptive sports like table tennis and fencing. That paper helped launch the open-skill narrative that has since spread through fitness media, brain-health blogs, and marketing copy for racket-sport programs.

The new findings do not contradict the cognitive benefits of exercise itself. A 2025 network meta-analysis of 32 ball-sport studies in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation found table tennis ranked first among eight ball sports for improving Trail Making Test performance (SUCRA 95.4%) and second for Go/No-Go inhibitory control (SUCRA 80.0%). Training studies — where novices take up a sport and change over time — tell a consistent story of measurable cognitive gains.

What the new study challenges is the cross-sectional shortcut: scanning elite performers, sorting them into bins, and inferring that the bins caused the differences. Elite populations are filtered — young athletes who survive national-squad selection differ from the general population in processing speed before they ever master a serve. Taxonomies that look predictive in small, clean samples collapse under realistic elite-sport sampling conditions, where subgroups differ in size, age, and gender composition.

The Takeaway for Table Tennis Players

Three honest conclusions survive this scrutiny.

First, elite athletes across all eight sports processed information meaningfully faster than the population average — a difference of nearly 13 IQ-referenced points. Whatever combination of selection and training produces national-squad athletes, fast processing is part of the package.

Second, the advantage is sport-specific, not category-specific. Table tennis players out-scored ice hockey players on processing speed in this dataset, but basketball led the field, and the open-versus-closed lens explained none of it. If a training program promises superior “executive function” because a sport carries the open-skill label, the evidence base for that specific claim just got weaker.

Third, the intervention evidence — actual beginners learning table tennis and improving cognition over weeks — remains the strongest reason to believe the sport is good for the brain. That evidence comes from randomized trials, not from comparing elite players to gymnasts.

The deeper lesson is methodological, and it is one this field has been slow to absorb. As the authors put it, conclusions about cognitive differences among high-performance athletes cannot be reliably drawn from taxonomic classifications. The brain does not read our category labels. Each sport makes its own specific demands, and each athlete arrives with their own history. Studies that respect that specificity — rather than reaching for tidy bins — are the ones worth trusting.

Sources

• Will L, Musculus L, Zentgraf K, de Haan H, Redlich D, Raab M. A Critical Examination of the Usefulness of Taxonomies for Comparing Cognitive Functions Across Sports. European Journal of Sport Science. 2026;26(7):e70209. DOI: 10.1002/ejsc.70209
• Voss MW, Kramer AF, Basak C, Prakash RS, Roberts B. Are expert athletes ‘expert’ in the cognitive laboratory? A meta-analytic review. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 2009;24(6):812-826. DOI: 10.1002/acp.1588
• Wang Y, Luo Z, Zhang T, Zhang M, Kapilevich L, Wang J. Effects of Ball Sports on Cognitive Function: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis. BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation. 2025;17(1):215. DOI: 10.1186/s13102-025-01268-2