Real-time strategy games like StarCraft might not only increase a person's perceptual abilities, but also enhance their cognitive abilities.

In a study of 72 non-gaming female University of Texas students, playing StarCraft for an hour a day was found to significantly increase their cognitive flexibility, a trait linked to a person's ability to find creative solutions to problems and juggle different concepts simultaneously. "[Playing a real-time strategy game] is training so many different aspects of cognition at once," says Brian Glass of Queen Mary University, lead author of the paper published in PLOS One. "[As a result] the brain is getting used to this rigorous mental exercise," allowing it to better perform in cognitive tasks.


The effects of gaming on the brain has been studied before, with research showing that first-person shooters like Call of Duty have a positive impact on a person's visual abilities.

However, this study looked at whether real-time strategy games, which require a great deal of task management and strategising, have an impact on a person's ability to think quickly and accurately about different tasks. Put crudely, it measured whether playing a game like StarCraft could make a person more clever.

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The participants were separated into three groups: one played a version of StarCraft in which they only had one base; another played a more difficult version in which they had two bases in separate locations to manage; and a third simply played the Sims 2.

They were asked to play for about an hour a day, and 40 hours in total. Their cognitive flexibility was tested using psychological tests before and after the 40 hours of gaming, with the group that played StarCraft showing a marked increase in test scores, above and beyond the expected improvement from doing the same twice test.

While it could be argued that a comparison between the Sims 2 and StarCraft is not an appropriate one, the study also found that the group who had to manage two bases on

StarCraft performed even better than the group who had to manage only one. "They were able to solve the tasks in a faster and more accurate way," says Glass. "They didn't have to make the tradeoff between speed and accuracy [as much as the other groups]."


Importantly, the results of the study suggest that cognitive flexibility can be improved through training, which Glass admits is a controversial theory. He says that more research will be needed to replicate the results.

In the meantime, he reports that by the end of the study, the participants were winning, on average, almost 50 percent of their

StarCraft games. Which isn't bad considering they were complete novices to begin with, but I don't think Starcraft 2 World Champion STX_INnoVation will be worrying just yet.