Executive function is a critical component of esports performance and gaming competency. It is well established that executive function can be improved through selective training. The esports community has various opinions on whether genetics vs practice plays a large role in the development of esports skills. This paper suggests that practice is important for skill development.
Participants were randomly assigned to either a video game training group or a control group. The video game training group played a fast-paced action game for 20 hours over the course of two weeks, while the control group did not play any video games.
After the training period, both groups were tested on a battery of tasks that assessed executive control skills, such as attention, working memory, and task switching. The results showed that the video game training group significantly improved their performance on all of the executive control tasks, compared to the control group.
Participants: Twenty students and non-students were recruited from the Berlin community through two types of information flyers. One type of flyer promoted a series of experiments for males highly experienced in action video gaming (video gamers), while the other type of flyer promoted this series for males inexperienced in video gaming (non-gamers). Only males were recruited because of the relative scarcity of females with sufficient experience in video game playing.
The results of the study showed that video gamers had significantly faster reaction times and lower error rates than non-gamers in both the dual-task and task-switching tests. These findings suggest that video game practice can lead to significant improvements in executive control skills.
The authors concluded that video game practice can lead to significant improvements in executive control skills. They suggest that this may be due to the fact that video games require players to constantly monitor multiple sources of information, make quick decisions, and switch between tasks. These skills are also important in everyday life, and so the authors believe that video game practice could have a number of benefits for cognitive performance.
Some clinical takeaways from this study include:
It is important to note that this study was conducted with a relatively small sample size, and so further research is needed to confirm the findings. However, the results of this study suggest that video game practice may be a promising new intervention for improving cognitive performance.
Source: Strobach T, Frensch PA, Schubert T. Video game practice optimizes executive control skills in dual-task and task-switching situations. Acta Psychol (Amst). 2012 May;140(1):13-24. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.02.001. Epub 2012 Mar 14. PMID: 22426427.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22426427/
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