FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

S2 Cognition attempts to quantify split-second reaction times to visual stimuli on a computer screen. The cognitive skills measured by the S2 evaluation are the same cognitive skills engaged on the field, court, or ice. Our evaluation is devoid of racial bias, it does not measure IQ, intelligence or classroom type knowledge, and it cannot be studied for. It requires simple reactions to quick moving visual stimuli on the screen.

The S2 Eval requires taking the test on a specialized laptop or XBOX. Individual athletes can take The S2 Eval at one of our S2 Labs across the country. Additional labs will be opening soon.

Coaches, teams, and tournament and camp organizers can book the S2 Mobile Lab, which will bring an S2 testing facility to you – anywhere across the country.

The S2 Eval measures the same brain systems that athletes engage during play, which are very different than what is measured in the classroom and on standard IQ tests. Decisions in the classroom and on tests of intelligence measure abilities in everyday sorts of thinking skills and when you have minutes or hours to process information and make decisions. Athletes make split-second decisions in sub-second time frames.

We have tested incredible athletes who struggle in the academic classroom, but who can see, process, and react with incredible skill on the field. Similarly, just because someone excels in the classroom, those skills don’t always translate to the field. Whether you score high or low on specific skills in the S2 evaluation has very little relationship to academic performance or intelligence.

S2 did not invent the battery of tests used to evaluate athletes. The scientists at S2 took the most validated and studied tests of different cognitive processes from the scientific literature being used in labs all around the world for decades. These tests have robust psychometrics and test-retest reliability. As the database of athletes grows, S2 has created sport-specific and age-specific normative groups and relies on the partnerships with pro and college teams to ascertain relationships and correlations to on-field performance.

Like most complex behavioral and cognitive processes, performance involves a complicated combination of genetics and experience. There are certainly cognitive skills that depend a lot on genetics, but the expression of most cognitive skills depends a lot on opportunities to exercise these skills in learning experiences, practice, and real-world performance. Cognitive systems in the brain develop at different speeds and peak at different ages, and some systems are more trainable than others. As a general rule of thumb, many visual processing skills, such as how fast we recognize visual information, are pretty well developed by our early teens, so training should really be focused on learning to process the visual cues in the performance context as well as possible rather than trying to do generic visual training to further develop your visual processing systems. Other cognitive skills, such as impulse control and controlling our distractibility, aren’t fully developed until our late teens and sometimes into our mid-twenties, and these systems are more trainable and able to be adapted during performance. Still, the best approach is to train these systems in the performance context. The ultimate goal for training these cognitive systems is to push these systems to be the best they can be, as consistently as possible, when you perform on the field.