Basketball on the Brain

Those of you that follow professional basketball in the United States might remember this moment.

That’s Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks. He’s about to miss the game-tying free throw with 3.4 seconds left in the 3rd game of the 2006 NBA Finals against Miami. What you can’t see in this picture, however, are the dozens of Miami fans just a few feet away from Dirk, chanting loudly and swaying back and forth while wearing masks resembling a certain German-American celebrity Dirk admired:

The Miami fans may not have understood the cognitive underpinnings of their efforts at the time, but it’s likely that their antics were disrupting Mr. Nowitzki’s visual attentional processes. Previous studies have tied visual attentional control to superior performance in basketball free throws (Wilson, Vine, & Wood, 2009) as well as jump shots (Oudejans, Koedijker, Bleijendaal & Bakker, 2005). All those cheerleaders, bright lights, opposing players, and rowdy fans donning Hasselhoff masks no doubt posed a major challenge to Nowitzki’s ability to maintain his visual selective attention on the ball and hoop.

This week, the 2011 NBA Playoffs enter the Conference Semi-Final round, and it’s anyone’s guess as to which team will come out on top. Pundits might argue over the merits of coaching styles or passing fundamentals, but here at Lumosity we like to stick to the real fundamentals — working memory, processing speed, or, in this case, visual attention. Here’s the big question: can performance on a divided visual attention task like Birdwatching provide clues as to which teams will make it to the next round?

Maybe,  if we had Birdwatching scores for all the Dirk Nowitzkis and Anthony Parkers out there. While we’re sure there are at least a few NBA players among our 13 million members (the concept of “court vision” is a big deal in basketball), for the purposes of this investigation we’ll look instead at Lumosity members living in each NBA Playoff team’s city (after all, home games mean that all players spend at least some time in their team’s city during the regular season). If the NBA Playoffs were based on our members’ performance on Birdwatching, who would win?

Lumosity Member Birdwatching Performance in 2011 NBA Playoff Cities

If you haven’t seen the bracket for the 2011 NBA Playoffs, here’s the roster for the Conference Semi-Finals:

We drew data from 1,484 Lumosity members in NBA Playoff cities and then selected only those between the ages of 20 and 40 (the current ages of the oldest and youngest NBA Basketball players) who had played Birdwatching. We then averaged the maximum Birdwatching BPIs from every Lumosity member in each playoff city. This gave us the following city ranking:

Sure enough, Boston (1077) was the first to make it to the Semi-Finals with a complete sweep. Things don’t look quite so rosy for Oklahoma City, on the other hand — its Birdwatching BPI (708) is more than 200 points lower than Memphis (926). Here’s the complete bracket results, drawn out all the way to the finals:

Despite some close match-ups in the semi-finals, at the end of the day the bracket points to a clear winner. And the winning city of the 2011 Birdwatching Playoffs is…

All this could be good news or bad news, depending on which city you’re rooting for. But even if you’re in Oklahoma City, Dallas, Miami, or Atlanta, take heart — studies have found that the same visual attention skills related to Birdwatching can be improved through training. So better luck next year.

To learn more about BPI, the metric we used to compare each city’s performance, check out our blog post on Brain Performance Index. Or, to exercise your visual attention and boost your city’s scores, try some of Lumosity’s attention games.

Finally, before you think about wearing a Hasselhoff mask to one of the NBA playoff games, here’s some good news for the Dirk Nowitzkis of the world as well: researchers have found that training certain elements of visual attention can improve free-throw performance in the lab as well as on the court (Harle & Vickers, 2001).