Comparisons of Attention Control Abilities Between Elite and Amateur e-Athletes: Are Skilled Players Cognitively Superior?

It was proposed that enhanced cognitive ability is one of the most important attributions of elite e-sport players. To investigate if elite e-sport players possess a greater attention capacity than their amateur counterparts, 8 professionals and 8 amateur MOBA players were recruited and tested for their attention abilities with attentional blink, visual search, and reaction light response tests. The results from this study indicate that the elite players showed faster reaction time only in attention blink and visual search tasks, especially in the presented target condition, but not in the reaction light test (P = .018, .003, and .213, respectively). On the other hand, the elite players showed a greater response accuracy only in more difficult visual search tasks when the correct answer was absent (P = .003). These findings might imply enhanced attention abilities of the elite e-sport players who could maintain speeded processing ability even when the task is more challenging. The results might also be used as a benchmark for amateur e-sport players who need to improve their attention ability and playing performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]