Try these simple mental tests to see if you're a good athlete

Simple mental tests may be able to identify people who are likely to reach the top of their sport. That's according to researchers who showed that elite athletes who play team sports aren't just stronger and faster than the rest of us – some of their cognitive skills are better, too. Young soccer players, competing at the top level in Sweden, performed better than the general population on tests of so-called "executive function". And the better their results, the more goals they scored. Executive function isn't a measure of intelligence – it describes unconscious mental abilities like our working memory, which is involved in manipulating transient information to help us make decisions, and attentional control, which is our ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore.