Enhancing self-awareness and self-regulation to improve individual and collective joint-action in sports: preliminary findings from a two-step study

The ability to manage collective actions and to efficiently implement joint actions grounds on basic skills concerning self-awareness and self-regulation. Such skills are at the core of social abilities and of individual proficiency to regulate social dynamics. Empowering the ability to monitor and regulate own affective-behavioural reactions might then improve individual and collective performance in contexts that rely on efficient interactions with other social agents, e.g. team sports. We devised a two-step study in order to test whether empowering self-awareness/regulation skills via a technology-mediated training would optimize individual neurocognitive performance and collective performance in sports. As for the first step, sportspeople and control participants underwent the technology-mediated training for self-awareness and self-regulation, in which mindfulness-based activities were practiced with the support of a neurofeedback device, or a control training program. Training-induced changes in terms of neurocognitive performance were explored via standardized neuropsychological and electrophysiological assessment. Analysis highlighted significantly improved of self-regulation skills, as well as behavioural (reaction times at challenging cognitive tasks) and electrophysiological markers (N2 event-related potential) of neurocognitive efficiency. Findings at the individual level set the stage for the investigation of training-effects on collective performance (second-step).