PEOPLE who play computer games such as League Of Legends improve their level of visual attention over time, new research suggests.
A study by the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China found that expert players of real-time strategy (RTS) games are able to process information faster and allocate more cognitive power to visual stimuli.
RTS games, such as the Total War series and Age Of Empires, require planning, selective attention and teamwork to win.
Researchers looked at the long-term effects on a key cognitive function called temporal visual selective attention, which is the capacity to distinguish between important and irrelevant information.
Study author Dr Tiejun Liu said: "Our results suggest that long-term experience of action real-time strategy games leads to improvements in temporal visual selective attention."
The research involved 38 university students, of which half were expert League Of Legends players.
The remaining half were beginners with less than six months of experience on the RTS game, which requires players to use teamwork to destroy the base of an opposing team.
For the test, volunteers were put in front of a screen and participated in 480 blink tasks over a two-hour period. A blink task, which is a study of visual selective attention, involves the subject being shown a stream of digits and letters in quick succession.
They are then and asked to press a button each time they see one of the two target letters.
"We found that expert League Of Legend players outperformed beginners in the task," said study co-author Dr Weiyi Ma.
