Goalies Actually Process The World Differently, Study Finds : ScienceAlert

There are 11 players on a soccer team, but goalkeepers stand alone, wearing different shirts, playing by different rules, and often positioned far from their teammates. Now new research suggests goalies process the world around them in a different way too.

Researchers in Ireland looked at a group of 60 individuals, including professional soccer players (20 goalkeepers and 20 outfield players), as well as 20 people who didn’t play the game at all.

“Unlike other football players, goalkeepers are required to make thousands of very fast decisions based on limited or incomplete sensory information,” says behavioral neuroscientist and former professional goalkeeper Michael Quinn, from Dublin City University.

“This led us to predict that goalkeepers would possess an enhanced capacity to combine information from the different senses, and this hypothesis was confirmed by our results.”

Trials…