<p>Athletes are often trained to anticipate movements via visual cues that occur before the execution of an action. However, it remains unclear whether and how cue information affects athletes’ decision-making. To address this issue, this study conducts the first multilevel Bayesian meta-analysis to systematically quantify the cueing, benefit, and cost effects on athletes’ reaction times in the context of cue-target tasks. We integrate 72 studies from 32 articles involving 885 athletes to explore the attention strategies used by athletes across different types of cues and sports. The key findings reveal that the benefit effect of domain-general cues is more pronounced than the corresponding cost effect. In addition, both the cueing and benefit effects are positively correlated with cue validity. Strategic athletes can obtain significant benefits from cue utilization, whereas interceptive athletes experience costs in this context. These findings suggest that athletes flexibly adjust their attention on the basis of cue type and sport demands. This research deepens our theoretical understanding of the attention strategies employed by athletes in complex environments and provides valuable insights into sports training practices. Future research should explore multifactor interactions with the goal of investigating the relationship between cue processing and athletic performance comprehensively.</p>