A new study, published in the British Psychological Society’s British Journal of Psychology, reveals that regular gamers exhibit enhanced performance in tasks assessing cognitive functions, including attention and memory.
The study, which took place at the Lero Esports Science Research Lab at the University of Limerick, involved 88 young adults, half of whom regularly played more than seven hours of action-based video games each week.
Participants were tested with three tasks measuring different aspects of their cognitive performance – a simple reaction time test, a task that involved switching between responding to combinations of numbers and letters to evaluate executive function and working memory, and a maze-based activity to assess visuospatial memory.