Visual and auditory integration in sport performance.

In everyday life, our actions are guided by a variety of perceptual cues: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, olfactory. It is well known that a correct cognitive integration of these cues leads to a more effective representation of our environment. In sport performance, cross-modal integration plays a crucial role. In particular, the integration between visual and auditory cues can be systematically studied from a cognitive perspective, in the attempt to individuate the guidelines to build mental strategies. Although practicing sports intuitively seems to be a highly visually dependent behaviour, and visual inputs tend to dominate other modalities, we experimentally studied the role of the auditory information, and its potential implications to enhance the performance in a few sports. We systematically manipulated the visual and auditory stimulation to evaluate their relative influence on performance. Our results seem to be coherent with literature claiming that auditory information is an essential factor to guide motor action in sport activities. This kind of suggestion, emerging from applied studies in sport activities, offers important indications for developing cognitive models about mental strategies in sport.