A study was conducted at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China by scientists. They’d gotten together people who played League of Legends for 1 hour, they said that the brain had experienced changes in activity.

They also improved their focus on more important and relevant information, while screening out distractions. The researchers brought 29 male students to participate in their studies. One group had at least 2 years of experience, while the other group had less than 6 months of experience playing the video game.

The group with the more experienced players were in the top 7 percent of League of Legends players. The less experienced players were ranked in the bottom 11 percent.

The players’ “visual selective attention” was calculated by the researchers before and after playing League of Legends.

The study authors measured visual selective attention with a test involving squares that

Shined and flashed, on different parts of a computer screen. First, the participants were momentarily shown a square in the center of the screen which was followed by a square flashing somewhere else on the screen. The people participating had to then tell the scientists where on the screen the location of the second square was, relatively to the first one.

The participants’ brain activity was watched and monitored during the visual selective attention test using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine.

Before playing the video game, the expert participants were found to having stronger and more attentive visual selective attention than the non-experts, and their EEG results shown more attention relative brain activity. The findings demonstrate a measurable increase in brain activity and visual selective attentions scores in participants.