Are there professional cognitive science test subjects? I'm interested in how cognitive science experiments are designed and executed. Up until now, all of the papers I've seen dealing with cognition use availability of test subjects as one of the major factors of recruitment for experiments. For example, students are recruited for an experiment, and because the group is so diverse, they are tested on general skills that the entire group would possess, like reading or math. 

For example, consider this experiment: "Happiness economics" in reverse: Does happiness affect productivity? There were 276 university students and faculty involved. The students are tested with a math task.

Math and reading comprehension are general skills, and I can think of few people who earn their living with those skills, aside from SAT tutors.

I'm interested if there have been other types of cognitive experiments tried, where the skills used to evaluate experiment are at a "professional" level. For example professional athletes, soldiers or pilots come to mind.


Experiments that use scoring percentage as a metric for basketball players
Experiments that use marksmanship grouping as a metric
Professional video game players


Are there any groups of people, whose professional skills are consistently tested as metric of cognitive performance? 

Thank you for your input!
There are a few people who have been very extensively experimented on because they have unusual brain lesions (which is kind of like the opposite of a skill). The most famous is Henry Molaison (HM), who developed a rare case of episodic anterograde amnesia following surgery for severe epilepsy. He spent the entire latter part of his life in a care institute and was a continuous subject of various learning experiments and imaging studies. Another patient with very specific memory-related lesions is KC, who has been the subject of at least 20 case studies. 

A couple of other studies that might be of interest are West et al. (2008), who recruited experienced video game players in order to find people with strong skills at rapid visual scanning, and research by Eleanor Maguire and colleagues that examined structural changes in the brains of new London taxi drivers as they acquired their fantastically detailed spatial map of the city's streets. 


  West, G. L., Stevens, S. A., Pun, C., &amp; Pratt, J. (2008). Visuospatial
  experience modulates attentional capture: Evidence from action video
  game players. Journal of Vision, 8(16).
  
  Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D.,
  Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S., &amp; Frith, C. D. (2000).
  Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi
  drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8),
  4398-4403.