For many years, gamers have claimed that playing video games has made them smarter. Loosely, since the first 8-Bit computer games were popular, however, it has often been remarked by either parents or teachers that gamers are doing damage to their brains rather than good. The accusation that video games have bred violence is one that constantly comes up and yet is refuted by gamers just as regularly.

Finally, gamers in popular Esports such as Warcraft and Age of Empires can now lay claim to their brains being actively trained by the games that they participate in.

A new study carried out by the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience has revealed that regular gamers – Esports professionals being a good example of this – can process visual information faster than those who don’t play real-time strategy-based games. These games include titles such as Warcraft, Age of Empires or Total War.

In an interview in The Independent newspaper in Great Britain, Sally Guyoncourt reported that Dr Diankun Gong, the study’s author and Associate Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China said, “Or aim was to evaluate the long-term effect of experience with action real-time strategy games on temporal visual selective attention.”