Possible Duplicate:Any work being done on Perception, Action, and/or Cognition in Video games? Are there any research studies that show this?See a thread on Quora for some initial discussion, but few research articles so far.For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of  the drosophila of cognitive sciencethe model organism that  scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than  the rest of us. StarCraft 2, however, might be emerging as the rhesus  macaque: its added complexity may confound researchers initially, but  the answers could ultimately be more telling.   I cant think of a  cognitive process thats not involved in StarCraft, says Mark Blair,  a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University. Its working  memory. Its decision making. It involves very precise motor skills.  Everything is important and everything needs to work together.Blair, the Simon Fraser University scientist running the SkillCraft  project, asked gamers at all ability levels to submit their replay  files. He and his colleagues collected more than 4500 files, of which  at least 3500 turned out to usable. What weve got is a satellite  view of expertise that no one was able to get before, he says. We  have hundreds of players at the basic levels, then hundreds more at  level slightly better, and so on, in 8 different categories of  players. By comparing the techniques and attributes of low-level  players with other gamers up the chain of ability, they can start to  discern how skills developand perhaps, over the long run, identify  the most efficient training regimen.Both Blair and Lewis see parallels between the game and emergency  management systems. In a high-stress crisis situation, the people in  charge of coordinating a response may find themselves facing competing  demands. Alarms might be alerting them to a fire burning in one part  of town, a riot breaking out a few streets over, and the contamination  of drinking water elsewhere. The mental task of keeping cool and  distributing attention among equally urgent activities might closely  resemble the core challenge of Starcraft 2. For emergencies, you  dont get to train eight hours a day. You get two emergencies in your  life but you better be good because lives are at stake, Blair says.  Training in something like Starcraft could be really useful.
Do expert computer gamers have unusual physiological or mental characteristics?
neurobiology;performance;video games;expertise