Recent Study Shows That Video Games Improve Attention

According to a recent study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, playing an hour of video games improves people's attention.

Twenty-nine male grad and undergrad students were separated into their time and skill with the popular MOBA, League of Legends. Group 1 had over 2 years time with the game and a 7% expertise ranking. Group 2 had less than 6 months with the game and an understandably lower ranking.

The study took place in 3 stages: A VSA test, an hour of video games, and another VSA test. The participants, connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, had their visual selective attention (VSA) tested. This was done by focusing on a square on a screen and responding when a new square appears, indicating the direction of the new square with a controller. The participants then play 1 hour of League of Legends, after which they perform the VSA test again.



Results showed an improvement in average response times. The experts had a smaller improvement, while the non-experts had a drastic improvement, placing them to the same degree as the experts.

It's also noted that the experienced gamers had a higher VSA than non-gamers in the pre-game test. This is possibly from long-term exposure to video games.

As cool as this information is, more testing is required to establish legitimate information. Larger, more diverse test groups are needed, and a wider range of video game genres need to be experimented with. Even so, good to know video games aren't actually making our attention spans worse.