The relationship between social exclusion and meaning in life among college students: a moderated mediation model.

Cognitive and physical efforts are closely coupled, because both rely on partly overlapping attentional and executive resources and can therefore influence each other's performance (, ). This coupling is particularly relevant in team sports, where athletes must anticipate and respond to teammates and opponents while executing complex motor actions and making decisions under time pressure (, ). High-level performance therefore depends not only on automatized motor patterns, but also on the ability to flexibly adapt actions to rapidly changing environmental demands (). These considerations have motivated growing interest in the relationship between cognitive functions and sports performance. However, this field faces a significant methodological challenge: cognitive processes can be trained and measured under highly controlled laboratory conditions, but such conditions cannot adequately mirror the demands of real-life situations (), which unfold under physical and emotional stress, strict time constraints, and complex perception-action demands. Because skill generalization is typically weak across domains or situations that are only loosely related to one another (), screen-based executive-function training may improve performance on trained or closely related laboratory tasks, but evidence for transfer to real sport performance remains inconsistent (). Thus, the limited far-transfer of laboratory-based cognitive gains remains a fundamental challenge for coaching in team sports. Recent work on athletic skill development therefore emphasizes how cognitive and motor components are combined during practice. Traditional training methods often separate perceptual-motor components, such as technical skills, from perceptual-cognitive components, such as tactical decision-making (), whereas training appears to be more effective when cognitive tasks are directly related to the motor component (). This supports the idea that technical and tactical skills should be acquired simultaneously, within the same context and in an integrated manner ().