Cognitive and Behavioral Correlates of Achievement in a Complex Multi-Player Video Game

Adam M Large,Benoit Bediou,Daphne Bavelier,Sezen Cekic,Yuval Hart,C Shawn Green

doi:10.17645/mac.v7i4.2314

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has accrued demonstrating that video games are capable of placing substantial demands on the human cognitive, emotional, physical, and social processing systems. Within the cognitive realm, playing games belonging to one particular genre, known as the action video game genre, has been consistently linked with demands on a host of cognitive abilities including perception, top-down attention, multitasking, and spatial cognition. More recently, a number of new game genres have emerged that, while different in many ways from “traditional” action games, nonetheless seem likely to load upon similar cognitive processes. One such example is the multiplayer online battle arena genre (MOBA), which involves a mix of action and real-time strategy characteristics. Here, a sample of over 500 players of the MOBA game League of Legends completed a large battery of cognitive tasks. Positive associations were observed between League of Legends performance (quantified by participants’ in-game match-making rating) and a number of cognitive abilities consistent with those observed in the existing action video game literature, including speed of processing and attentional abilities. Together, our results document a rich pattern of cognitive abilities associated with high levels of League of Legends performance and suggest similarities between MOBAs and action video games in terms of their cognitive demands.

Highlights

There is a long history of interest in the cognitive, emotional, physical, and/or social demands that are inherent in complex real-world experiences
While simple visual inspection of League of Legends gameplay might have suggested that substantial cognitive demands are involved, these empirical results strengthen the case that similar demands are placed on at least some cognitive sub-systems as do more traditionally identified action video games
A second related follow-up would be to examine the potential for interventions meant to improve performance on the cognitive abilities identified here to in turn improve performance in League of Legends

Summary

Introduction

There is a long history of interest in the cognitive, emotional, physical, and/or social demands that are inherent in complex real-world experiences. The proposal that action video games place extreme demands on speed of processing and attention in particular has been supported by the consistent finding of enhanced performance on, for instance, speed of processing and attentional control tasks in action gamers as compared to non-gamers (Appelbaum, Cain, Darling, & Mitroff, 2013; Colzato, van Leeuwen, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2010) This correlational work has been further supported and augmented by intervention studies that have demonstrated that long-term training on action video games can enhance those core constructs (Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007; Strobach, Frensch, & Schubert, 2012; for recent meta-analyses on both expert/novice designs and intervention designs see, Bediou et al, 2018)

Methods

Results

Conclusion