08/25/2026
What separates elite esports performance from ordinary gaming experience?
This study compare professional action video game players with experienced amateur FPS players.
14 professional Overwatch League players were compared with 16 experienced amateur players across a neuropsychological test battery and five NeuroTracker sessions.
The professional players showed stronger performance in several areas linked to attention and dynamic visual processing.
Key differences included:
NeuroTracker performance: professionals higher overall, p = .03
Visual spatial memory: 23.0 vs 19.5, p = .002
Selective attention / correct visual processing: 521.86 vs 474.94, p = .03
The NeuroTracker finding is especially relevant because the task required players to track multiple moving targets among distractors in a dynamic 3D scene โ a demand that overlaps with the fast, attention-heavy environments of action video games.
This was a cross-sectional study, but it does suggest that professional gaming expertise is associated with a distinctive cognitive profile, especially around attention, visual memory, and dynamic perceptual-cognitive performance.
Study: โCognitive Characterization of Expertise in Action Video Games.โ
https://www.neurotrackerx.com/science/cognitive-characterization-of-expertise-in-action-video-games