Scientists even suggest that games like these can be used to train attention.
Neurophysiologists from China monitored the brain work of people who constantly play computer strategies, and came to the conclusion that this increases their attentiveness, improving the ability to quickly highlight the main things in the field of vision. An article with these findings was published by the scientific journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
“Our observations show that extensive experience in playing strategy significantly improved the selectivity of human attention. In particular, veteran players were significantly more efficient in managing their cognitive resources by observing a set of different goals. This suggests that such games can be used to train attention, commented one of its authors, a neurophysiologist from the University of Electronics and Technology of China Tijun Liu.
For the past 20 years, scientists, public figures, politicians and parents have been discussing the benefits and dangers of computer games, how they can affect the behavior of children and adults, as well as the functioning of the human brain.
Recently, neurophysiologists and psychologists have become interested in this issue. Their experiments and observations have shown that computer games do not cause addiction, similar to alcohol or drugs. At the same time, some of them turned out to be useful for episodic memory and human reaction, while others, on the contrary, worsened long-term memory.
Liu and his colleagues discovered another positive feature of computer games. They studied how the extensive experience of playing certain types of computer strategies, in which players constantly need to switch their attention and quickly focus it on different objects, influenced the ability of their brains to filter important and unnecessary information.
Brain strategies
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To answer this question, neuroscientists gathered a group of four dozen students from their university, half of whom played professionally in League of Legends, which combines elements of strategy and action. Scientists chose this game because it requires both strategic thinking and quick tracking of what is happening on the screen and reacting to important events.
Chinese researchers tested whether playing League of Legends affected their students' brains using an electroencephalograph and a simple mindfulness test. Scientists very quickly displayed a random set of letters and numbers on a computer screen and asked volunteers to press a button if they saw certain characters.
Neurophysiologists, as Liu explains, have noticed for a long time that people often fail in such tests if the desired characters appear on the monitor almost immediately after each other, for several hundred milliseconds. As the researchers suggest, this is due to the fact that the brain does not have time to process incoming signals. This leads to the fact that a person sometimes simply does not notice the second character, which appeared 200-500 milliseconds after the first.
The experiment showed that the brains of professional League of Legends players processed such signals much faster than the nervous systems of other students participating in the experiment did. On average, they hit the button correctly 96-98% of the time, while the less experienced players sometimes hit 86%.
These discrepancies were confirmed by EEG measurements. Gamers' brains reacted much more actively to incoming signals and completed their analysis 50-100 ms faster than other participants in the experiment. The first, as scientists note, suggests that professionals were much better at distributing attention and were able to focus it than less experienced League of Legends players.
According to Liu and his colleagues, this suggests that such strategy games can be used to train attention and the ability to distribute it to critical targets in those areas of industry and economics where it is especially important. To do this, however, the researchers conclude, it is necessary to check whether the players will react as quickly to the appearance and disappearance of objects not on the computer screen, but in the real world.