Associations Between Avid Action and Real-Time Strategy Game Play and Cognitive Performance: a Pilot Study

Over the past 15 years, numerous studies have demonstrated that action video game players outperform non-gamers on a variety of cognitive measures. However, few researchers have examined the potential beneficial effects of playing real-time strategy games or the effect of playing multiple game genres. As such, the purpose of the current study was to (a) replicate the existing findings that show cognitive differences between action gamers (AVGPs) and non-gamers (NVGPs), (b) examine whether real-time strategy gamers (SVGPs) also differ from NVGPs on various cognitive tasks, and (c) examine how multi-genre video game players (“Tweeners”) compare to both AVGPs and NVGPs. We created a large task battery that tapped into various aspects of cognition (i.e., reaction time, selective attention, memory, executive control, and fluid intelligence) in order to examine the tasks that differed between our three gamer groups and non-gamers. Our results largely replicated the majority of the findings to date, such that AVGPs outperformed NVGPs on a wide variety of cognitive tasks, but the two groups do not differ in memory performance or fluid intelligence. We also demonstrated that SVGPs had numerically faster response times on several tasks as compared to the NVGPs. This pattern of results was similar to what was found with the AVGPs, although in the case of the SVGPs not all of the results reached the level of statistical significance. Lastly, we demonstrated that Tweeners perform similarly to genre-pure gamers in that their performance on several cognitive tasks was numerically better than for NVGPs, although the performance of the Tweeners was numerically lower than for both the AVGPs and the SVGPs. Overall, these findings have several implications for game studies, particularly with respect to how SVGPs and Tweeners are considered going forward. © 2017, Springer International Publishing.