Technological Advancements in Sport Psychology

In the 20th century, the entire face of sports changed drastically with the advent of new technologies which have significantly narrowed the gap between world record holders and the way the athletic achievement is perceived, besides the growing importance of sports technology for recording, analyzing and optimizing athletic performances. This chapter provides an overview over technological advancements in sports psychology as well as their characteristics and fields of applications. After introducing the topic, we describe techniques to create and enrich the physical environment of the athletes, such as virtual-, augmented- and mixed reality. Then we explain attentional, auditory and brain related technologies (such as eye tracking, sonification, and EEG) to improve the cognitive processes of the athetes, and describe how they can be used for diagnostics and training in sport psychology. The chapter concludes with consequences on applied work, such as usability and learnability aspects, as well as ethical questions.