Playing video games can strengthen your brain power, claim scientists

PLAYING video games is “powerful cognitive training”, according to brain scientists.

They found the brains of expert gamers are more agile –processing information at lightning speed and rationing brainpower better.

The team claims the effect applies to real-time strategy games (RTS games) such as League of Legends and World of Age of Empires.

It is the first study to examine the long-term effects of gaming on a type of brain function called temporal visual selective attention – the ability to tell the difference between important and irrelevant information presented very quickly.

Study author Dr Tiejun Liu, from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, said: “Our results suggest that long-term experience of action real-time strategy games leads to improvements in temporal visual selective attention.

“We conclude that such games can be a powerful tool for cognitive training.”

The researchers made their astounding findings by putting 38 gamers, who played League of Legends, to the test.

In the game, which has around 111 million regular players worldwide, competitors work as part of a team to fight opponents and destroy their “tower” behind enemy lines.

The group of volunteers, half ranked among the top seven per cent in the world and the other half beginners who ranked in the bottom 40 per cent, were given a “blink” test.

For two hours, each participant was shown a rapid sequence of letters and pressed a button when they saw either D or M.

Attentional blink is the tendency of people to “blink” – but fail to register – a visual cue if it appears so quickly after a previous cue that cognitive processing of the first hasn’t finished. People often “blink” a second target if it appears within 200-500 milliseconds of the first.

Those players with a higher ranking and more experience beat their less experienced counterparts.

The study’s co-author Dr Weiyi Ma, Assistant Professor in Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Arkansas, US, said: “We found that expert League of Legend players outperformed beginners in the task.

“The experts were less prone to the blink effect, detecting targets more accurately and faster.

“They also gave more attentional cognitive resources to each target.”

Dr Diankun Gong, Associate Professor in the Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Neuroinformation at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, added: “Our aim was to evaluate the long-term effect of experience with action realtime strategy games on temporal visual selective attention.

“In particular, we wanted to reveal the time course of cognitive processes during the attentional blink task, a typical task used by neuroscientists to study visual selective attention.”