Counter-Strike players may have an unexpected career advantage in emergency response and air traffic control, study finds

Counter-Strike players, one of the largest groups of gamers in the first-person shooter (FPS) genre, could be ideal candidates for emergency response jobs that are meant for those who can make split-second decisions, a study suggests.

According to the new University of Sheffield research that tried to debunk myths about video games, expert players possess faster brain processing than beginners. As per the researchers in the first-of-its-kind study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, expert gamers with over 5,000 hours of gameplay experience have faster mental processing speed than novices.

Researchers found, after testing over 300 CS2 players on how quickly they process and react to visual information, that expert players were, on average, 90 milliseconds faster at reacting under test conditions than novices.


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Eleanor Hyde, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield’s School of Psychology and the lead author of the study, said, “Although it may not sound like a lot, 90 milliseconds could be the difference between life and death in situations requiring rapid reactions, such as stopping quickly to avoid a road traffic collision.”

“However, at this stage, we don’t have the data to determine whether this reaction speed is a result of playing the game for hours or end, or if people with naturally faster processing abilities gravitate towards these games,” she added.

The researcher hypothesized that “if it’s the former, it may be that training people in middle age or later life on such games could improve cognitive performance. If it's the latter, reaction speed could serve as a useful indicator of skills crucial for high-stakes professions such as emergency response, air traffic control and driving.”

In the study, the players who reacted faster also acted quickly when it came to both absorbing visual information and physically pressing the desired button.

“There is a common misconception that playing video games is a fun hobby that doesn’t have any positive impacts on your brain,” Eleanor said in the statement. “We’re working to test this stereotype by developing a robust evidence base on the cognitive implications of gaming. Once we fully understand these impacts, it opens the door to designing games that directly benefit society.”

Claudia von Bastian, co-author of the study and Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Sheffield, said: “One of the big questions in gaming research is whether the skills that make someone good at a game are useful beyond the game itself.”

The promising thing, as per her, is that players may not be very good at multitasking but are quick to react. “Our findings suggest that expert players are not necessarily better at juggling several things at once, as you might expect, but are faster at processing information and responding to it.”

“This gives us a more precise understanding of what distinguishes expert players, and an important starting point for investigating whether these skills extend to other fast-paced situations outside gaming,” she explained the findings, adding that the next challenge is to know where these differences came from, and whether people can develop quick reaction time through experience.

In the future, the team hopes that new research will show a way to track brain activity and visual movements during gameplay using eye-tracking technology and electroencephalography (EEG), with the help of non-invasive scalp sensors to monitor neural activity.