GAMERS ARE LESS SUSCEPTIBLE TO A COGNITIVELY FATIGUING TASK COMPARED TO AGE-MATCHED CONTROLS

Previous work shows that esports (particularly action video games; AVGs) place high demand on a number of cognitive abilities. Further work has demonstrated that this use of cognitive function manifests in the ability of AVGs to outperform non-gamer controls on a number of cognitive tests. With the large demand on cognitive resources over what can be long periods of time (i.e. over 2 hours) during gaming, we hypothesized that AVGs may have greater resistance to the effects of cognitive fatigue. To test this, we recruited a group of AVGs and Non- Gamers and randomly allocated them to a cognitive fatigue group or control group. Our results show that AVGs who underwent the cognitive fatigue intervention actually improved their performance on the cognitive tests more than AVGs in the control condition and NGs in both the control and cognitive fatigue conditions.