IS COGNITIVE INHIBITION AN INDICATOR OF EXPERTISE AMONG COMPETITIVE ESPORTS GAMERS?

This study for the first time tested whether cognitive inhibition, the mind’s ability to disregard stimuli that are irrelevant to the task at hand, and a known attribute of successful action video gaming (Castel, Pratt & Drummond, 2005; Kowal, Toth, Exton & Campbell, 2018), could be a marker of expertise among players of one of the most popular first person shooter esports, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Here we tested low, intermediate, and high ranked gamers and compared their performance on a color word stroop task and also compared the performance of players in each gaming rank group to non-gamers. We found that when considering both accuracy and response times, elite gamers performed significantly better than both intermediate and low ranked gamers on the simple choice reaction time condition (Accuracy, p<0.025; Response Time p<0.001) and significantly better than intermediate ranked gamers on the incongruent condition (an measure of cognitive inhibitory ability)(Accuracy, p<0.001; Response Time p<0.001).