Summary: Playing action real-time strategy video games during periods of social distancing may do more than pass the time — it could sharpen your visual attention. New research shows that experienced players process visual information more quickly, devote greater cognitive resources to individual visual targets, and distribute limited attention more effectively over time. These findings suggest long-term changes in brain function that improve temporal visual selective attention.
Source: Frontiers
Action real-time strategy games such as League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires, and Total War attract millions of players worldwide. These games require fast decision-making, strategic planning, teamwork, sensorimotor coordination, and sustained selective attention — all demands that challenge the brain’s information-processing systems.
Previous studies have linked video game experience with cognitive benefits like improved contrast sensitivity, enhanced eye–hand coordination, and stronger memory performance. However, until now the long-term effects of action real-time strategy gaming on the temporal component of visual selective attention — the ability to pick out relevant items from a rapid sequence of visual stimuli — remained understudied.
In a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers led by Dr. Diankun Gong examined whether long-term experience with action real-time strategy games relates to improvements in temporal visual selective attention. The study combined behavioral testing with electrophysiological measurements to track both performance and underlying brain activity during an attentional blink task.
The attentional blink is a well-known phenomenon in which a person fails to detect a second target if it appears within about 200–500 milliseconds after a first target in a rapid visual stream. This “blink” reflects temporary limits on cognitive resources: encoding and responding to the first stimulus consumes processing capacity, making it harder to register the second stimulus when it arrives shortly afterward.
To test whether gaming experience reduces the attentional blink, the team recruited 38 healthy young male students from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Half were expert players of the action real-time strategy game League of Legends, each with at least two years’ experience and ranked among the top 7% of players. The other half were classified as beginners, with less than six months’ experience and rankings within the lower 30–45%.
Participants completed an attentional blink task consisting of 480 trials over roughly two hours. In each trial they viewed a rapid stream of letters and digits and pressed a button whenever one of two target letters appeared. The researchers measured detection accuracy and reaction times to assess behavioral performance: greater susceptibility to the attentional blink meant fewer correct responses to second targets appearing in the critical 200–500 ms window.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes placed over parietal regions recorded Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) associated with target processing. The investigators focused on the P3b component — a positive peak occurring roughly between 200 and 500 ms after a stimulus — because its amplitude and latency are reliable markers of the cognitive resources allocated to processing and consolidating a target in working memory. Later and smaller P3b responses have been linked to poorer detection during the attentional blink.
Results showed that expert players outperformed beginners: experts detected targets more accurately and more quickly and were less prone to the attentional blink. Electrophysiologically, experts exhibited earlier P3b peak latencies, indicating faster information processing, and larger P3b amplitudes, reflecting greater allocation of attentional resources to each target. The pattern suggests experts distribute their limited cognitive capacity between successive stimuli more flexibly and effectively over time.
“Our aim was to evaluate long-term effects of action real-time strategy gaming on temporal visual selective attention,” said Dr. Diankun Gong. Coauthor Dr. Weiyi Ma added that the stronger P3b responses among experts indicate they devote more attentional resources to individual targets. Dr. Tiejun Liu concluded that long-term ARSG experience appears to enhance the brain’s ability to handle successive visual targets and that such games may serve as effective tools for cognitive training.
About this neuroscience research article
Original Research: Diankun Gong et al., “Action Real-Time Strategy Gaming Experience Related to Increased Attentional Resources: An Attentional Blink Study.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00101. This open-access study reports behavioral and EEG evidence that long-term action real-time strategy gaming experience is associated with improvements in temporal visual selective attention.
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