Neuroassessment in sports: towards a threefold model on physical-psychological-neurocognitive fitness

Profiling of athletes’ psycho-physical traits is a crucial step in planning, implementing, and monitoring their training schedule. Performance data may provide relevant and reliable information to evaluate athletes’ progress over time and/or rank them against their peers, and to help to profile their strengths/weaknesses, to adapt protocols to their needs, and to identify talent. Yet, the topics of assessment and, specifically, of its implementation in practice are still quite controversial. Indeed, despite the role of neural-cognitive load in modulating performance outcomes, assessment procedures to evaluate athletes’ current performance and their potential often move those factors to the background while focusing primarily on physical determinants of performance and basic physiological measures. Here we introduce a multifaceted model for the definition of performance in sports by pairing the more established constructs of physical fitness and psychological fitness with the construct of neurocognitive fitness. Such a model might foster a perspective change from traditional assessment to neuroassessment, which we identify with the integration of self-report, observational, and physiological measures to sketch the profile of athletes’ neurocognitive efficiency