The Color-Word Stroop Task Does Not Differentiate Cognitive Inhibition Ability Among Esports Gamers of Varying Expertise

Adam J Toth; Magdalena Kowal; Mark J Campbell

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02852

The Color-Word Stroop Task Does Not Differentiate Cognitive Inhibition Ability Among Esports Gamers of Varying Expertise

Front Psychol. 2019 Dec 20:10:2852. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02852. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Adam J Toth¹, Magdalena Kowal¹, Mark J Campbell^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Lero Irish Software Research Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.
² Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.

Abstract

This study set out for the first time to identify whether gamers of low, intermediate, and elite skill level in a prominent esports game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, demonstrated increasingly superior performance on a test of a specific cognitive skill (cognitive inhibition). 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. Contrary to our hypothesis, the Stroop Task did not differentiate significantly gamers of varying expertise. Although, 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 and both elite and novice gamers performed significantly better than intermediate ranked gamers on the incongruent condition (a measure of cognitive inhibitory ability).

Keywords: FPS; Stroop; action video games; cognitive control; counter-strike:global offensive; esport science.