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A landmark NeuroTracker study published Nature Scientific Reports showed that elite athletes have brains with superior capacities for learning, which could be a critical factor as to why they can achieve such high levels of performance on the sports field. Professor Faubert, the inventor of NeuroTracker explained the meaning of this for world-class athletes, “The fact that they are there…is because they are more plastic.  I think that’s one of the criteria.  You would think that this brain is optimal at the highest competitive level, that it’s reached its maximum potential.  But maybe they are there because they can acquire new potential so much more rapidly and so more efficiently.” Neuroplasticity is also known to be a key factor in brain health, with reduced plasticity being a related factor for increased risks of cognitive conditions such as dementia in older populations.

The NeuroTracker score itself is established in the neuroscience literature as a high-level measure of attentional capacity.  This means that the higher your score is, the better your attention.  It’s a high-level measure because performing NeuroTracker requires using and integrating several different types of attention.

Distributed or Divided Attention – similar to multi-tasking, tracking several targets at the same time requires allocating attentional resources separately to each individual target.

These results suggest that clinical measures of EF may differ among children with ADHD and controls at average IQ levels, but there is poorer discriminatory power for these measures among children with above average IQ.

Despite the large number of childhood and adolescent obesity treatment trials, we were only able to partially assess the impact of obesity treatment interventions on school achievement and cognitive abilities. School and community‐based physical activity interventions as part of an obesity prevention or treatment programme can benefit executive functions of children with obesity or overweight specifically. Similarly, school‐based dietary interventions may benefit general school achievement in children with obesity. These findings might assist health and education practitioners to make decisions related to promoting physical activity and healthy eating in schools. Future obesity treatment and prevention studies in clinical, school and community settings should consider assessing academic and cognitive as well as physical outcomes.