Six months of action gaming alters brain networks and improves visual attention

PsyPost

Mental Health

Social Psychology

Cognitive Science

Neuroscience

About

No Result

View All Result

Join

My Account

PsyPost

No Result

View All Result

Home

Exclusive

Cognitive Science

Six months of action gaming alters brain networks and improves visual attention

by<br>Karina Petrova

August 8, 2026

Reading Time: 5 mins read

[Adobe Stock]

Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

Playing fast-paced video games over several months may lead to measurable improvements in attention and changes in resting brain activity. A small study published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology suggests that action video games alter both local brain wave power and large-scale communication between brain regions. These neural shifts can even predict how much a person’s attention will improve after extended gaming practice.

Action video games require players to constantly scan a cluttered visual environment for sudden threats while maintaining focus on specific targets. Because of these intense mental demands, cognitive scientists frequently use first-person shooter games to explore how the human brain adapts to new challenges. Playing these games repeatedly forces the brain to process spatial and temporal information at high speeds.

Past research indicates that this type of gaming enhances selective attention, which is the ability to focus on relevant information while ignoring visual distractions. It also improves distributed attention, which involves spreading mental focus across a wide spatial area to monitor multiple events at once. Both types of attention depend on isolated brain regions as well as synchronized communication across the entire brain.

Previous neuroimaging studies examining video games have often been limited to short training periods lasting only a few weeks or hours. These brief interventions are useful for capturing immediate reactions, but they miss the slow, cumulative physical changes that occur in the brain over long periods. Older studies mostly focused on local brain activity rather than the complex networks connecting different lobes. Many studies also relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is expensive and physically restricts participants during training tasks.

To understand how extended video game play reshapes the brain over time, lead author Jihan Wang of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China designed a long-term experiment. Wang and a team of researchers tracked changes in localized brain waves and whole-brain connectivity over a half-year period. The team included Yan Peng, Bin Lv, and Dezhong Yao.

Free daily newsletter

The researchers recruited university students with little to no prior gaming experience. Forty-three participants completed the entire six-month protocol, making this a small study. The participants were instructed to play the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for one hour a day, five days a week, accumulating roughly 120 hours of play.

The researchers assessed the participants at the beginning of the study, at the three-month mark, and at the end of the six months. At each assessment point, the participants completed two distinct behavioral tasks. The first task evaluated selective attention by requiring participants to quickly scan lines of letters on a computer screen. They had to press a key only when they spotted a specific target letter, such as a "d" with two dashes, while ignoring other letters or similar characters.

The second task evaluated distributed attention by presenting six distinct shapes in the peripheral visual field around a central focal point. Participants had to identify whether a specific target shape was present among the other objects. Both tasks recorded the speed of correct responses, filtering out completely implausible reaction times to ensure accuracy.

Google News Preferences

Add PsyPost to your preferred sources

Reaction times on the selective attention task improved steadily between the baseline assessment and the six-month mark. Reaction times on the distributed attention task improved sharply between the baseline and the three-month mark. This metric showed continued improvement by the end of the study.

Alongside the behavioral tasks, the researchers recorded the electrical activity of each participant’s brain using electroencephalography, or EEG. These recordings were taken while the participants rested quietly with their eyes closed. Resting-state recordings provide a measure of the brain’s intrinsic, default organization rather than its reaction to an immediate stimulus. The fast response time of an EEG machine makes it an ideal tool for longitudinally tracking these gradual electrical shifts.

The team first analyzed local brain activity by breaking down the electrical signals into specific frequency bands. They focused on alpha waves, which are electrical pulses occurring...