Background: Cognitive enhancements are associated with persistent sport participation. The primary objective of this investigation was to assess mental fatigue during a prolonged simple reaction time task in athletes as compared to non-athletes. Methods: Forty men (20 athletes and 20 non-athletes; Age = 23.81 ± 2.28 years) completed a prolonged reaction time (RT) task of 51 min duration. The task included three periods of 17 min each, with no breaks, each period consisted of 200 RT trials. The participants’ ratings of mental fatigue were assessed with a modified visual analogue mood scale (VAMS) before and after the fatigue-inducing mental task. Results: Mental fatigue had a significant effect on both athletes and non-athletes (P ≤ .001). Athletes evidenced shorter RTs during the second and third periods of the prolonged reaction time task as compared with to non-athletes. Conclusion: This study suggested that athletes exhibit greater resistance to mental fatigue than non-athletes. It is therefore suggested that habitual exercise may reduce the negative effect of mental fatigue on a prolonged cognitive task.

In this study, were investigated various strategies of instructional and motivational self-talk on components of pass skill and shot performance. 72 students with age range 20/09±1/12 were selected randomly as research samples among the 187 students that were obtained General Physical Education (basketball) in the first semester 88-89 year. Firstly, test the speed and accuracy pass (Two-hand chest pass) and accuracy basketball's shot. Using the K-S test were examined normal distribution of data and then were divided to three groups of 24 persons (control, instructional self-talk [IST] and motivational self-talk [MST]) and were perform a course of training included 12 session (once a week during 20minute). Each group used of appropriate phrases related to instructional and motivational self-talk. Control group wasn’t applied no intervention. The results of paired-t test showed, speed pass and accuracy pass skills performance and accuracy shot had been improve in all groups, but this improvement was significant in speed and accuracy pass. In addition, one-way ANOVA showed IST had better performance than the other groups significantly (P<0/05) in accuracy pass and shot. But MST group performed speed passing faster than control group significantly (P<0/05). Overall, results showed that IST is more effective in skills which required precision and timing and MST is more beneficial in skills based on speed