Whole-Brain Functional Connectivity Reveals Role-Based Neural Distinctiveness in Team Sports

“Team chemistry”—the shared knowledge structures of roles, tactics, and game situations, together with effective communication among teammates—is critical for successful group performance. Although this phenomenon is widely discussed in sports commentary and organizational research, neurobiological approaches to understanding team cognition remain relatively scarce. Here, we investigate whether functional roles within a real-world team setting are associated with systematic differences in brain functional organization. Using whole-brain functional connectivity analysis, we examined cross-individual differences in distributed functional connectivity patterns among professional volleyball players. Neural similarity and distinctiveness were assessed during both resting-state scans and a naturalistic volleyball game-viewing paradigm to test whether role-related effects are expressed across intrinsic and contextually engaged brain states. Players’ experience and performance were controlled to mitigate potential confounding effects. We found that players occupying the same positions exhibited distinct functional connectivity patterns compared to those of different positions, especially when they were in the same team. To further validate the role-based account, we trained a machine learning model to predict whether two players shared the same court position based on intersubject differences in functional connectivity. Together, these findings suggest that long-term role-specific training and coordinated interaction shape players’ intrinsic brain networks, providing neural evidence for role-based functional shaping in team sports. This project was partially supported by a thematic grant from Academia Sinica (Grant No. AS-TP-112-H03). notReviewed other