Cognitive skills assessment of Delhi University defenders of football and hockey players

Abstract

The objective of the investigation was to look into and compare the cognitive skills of a subset of the University of Delhi's intercollegiate football and hockey players, specifically football and hockey defenders. These sub-variables include Imagery, Focusing, Refocusing, Competition Planning and Mental Practice. The study included a sample of 40 University of Delhi students. The participants were divided into two groups: Hockey Defenders (N=20) and Football Defenders (N=20). This study solely included male participants. Participants' ages ranged from 18 to 25. The researcher used a standardized method to examine the mental profiles of midfielders and attackers. The researcher used the (OMSAT-3, Version 2.2). The acquired data was subjected to an Independent Sample 't' test for comparison purposes. The Independent Sample 't' test was used on the acquired data to analyze the mental skills of Hockey Defenders and Football Defenders, specifically their cognitive skills, and to discover whether there were any significant differences between the two game roles. Only one variable of Cognitive Skills, Refocusing, demonstrates statistically significant differences with p-values < 0.05 at a significance level of 0.05. Nonetheless, p-values for remaining variables—focusing, imagery, competition planning, and mental practice—are higher than 0.05, indicating that there are no discernible changes between Defenders of Football and Hockey.