Cognitive motor performance in Starcraft 2 begins declining at age 24

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/age-related-brain-decline-starts-at-24-1.2611257

by graublau • 12 years ago

51 54 12 years ago

l33tbro• 12 years ago

My ability to play Starcraft well may have peaked at 24, but the leaps and bounds in my intelligence/acuity/personal development began at 24.

Edit: above comment based on OP's original headline

Blahah4• 12 years ago

This. Prior to 24 I was quite a moron. Since then I have been heading steadily down the path towards being master of my own mind, and I'm happy to say I've spent less than an hour playing computer games in the last 5 years.

mhurron4• 12 years ago

I'm happy to say I've spent less than an hour playing computer games in the last 5 years.

Exactly why is that something to be proud of?

oniTony• 12 years ago

I've observed the same experience. Makes sense, considering:

That critical parts of the brain involved in decision-making are not fully developed until years later at age 25 or so. [1]

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647...

CmonDev2• 12 years ago

I guess until you get smarter reflexes are there to help you survive by design from nature. Also maybe there is less brain matter for electric signals to penetrate hence the boost in reflex throughput :).

id2• 12 years ago

While I totally believe this to be true, I can't imagine myself to become much smarter once I've reached 24. I feel like I already know way more than many people older than me, well aware that I'm probably terribly wrong.

I mean, what ground-breaking stuff did you learn since? I would really like to read some anecdotes.

whiddershins2• 12 years ago

Only everything important. Sorry to be flip but it is so hard to sum up. I knew absolutely nothing at age 24. I had no idea how to deal with people, how to manage relationships, my energy, or long term goals. How to balance and prioritize. I am nearing 40 and feel I am finally taking the first baby steps towards having even the slightest clue about what's going on. I'm pretty sure I will die before I get most of it straight. If you've mastered all the skills you need by 24 you've either set your goals on the wrong thing or you are a prophet. But that's just one man's humble opinion.

zgoat• 12 years ago

I think this feeling is often eliminated by hindsight and change of circumstance. I've had the same sensation at a few points in my life until I broadened my fields of study, took on new roles, went broke etc.

In my own experience it's in the category of "You don't know what you don't know". If you are highly focussed on a narrow field of study or experience, yes, you definitely feel like you have "peaked" with respect to mastery. However, once you get exposed to "You now know what you don't know", a lot of things suddenly change.

juliocc2• 12 years ago

I refuse to accept that playing Startcraft is comprehensive measure of my brain's performance.

dang2• 12 years ago

Yes. Professional headline writers regularly exaggerate these things. It's a subgenre of linkbait.

The HN guidelines call for changing a title when it's misleading or linkbait. I rewrote this one accordingly. Suggestions for further improvement are welcome.

User comments that suggest more accurate, less baity titles are often helpful in cases like this. We're working on a bit of software to make it easier for people to suggest title (and url) changes. It should be ready soon and we'll do a Tell HN post about it.

juliocc2• 12 years ago

I was a bit outraged by the article and didn't really think about suggesting a better title. Will do next time.

baddox3• 12 years ago

I don't see anything incorrect about this headline. "Age-related brain decline starts at 24" is a pretty safe title that accurately represents the contents of the article. The subtitle "Popular game Starcraft 2 used as a measure of brain speed" provides additional clarification, as subtitles are intended to do.

zobzu2• 12 years ago

have you played starcraft at high level?

this is actually very demanding on brain functions. i find the "high speed chess" description not too far from the truth. it's not because it's a "game" that it's simple, easy, or "just require no-life practicing".

Don't make that mistake.

Top players are actually geniuses at making the best choice the fastest and tracking multiple tasks at the same time. All this happens in milliseconds, constantly, there is no break until the game is over.

I believe that the basic brain function is actually choice-making, which makes.. this benchmark pretty accurate. Wisdom, etc.. all this comes with experience and isn't related to the brain's ability to function at it's peak level.

baddox3• 12 years ago

Note the difference between "speed" and "performance."

carsongross• 12 years ago

Huh.

Right when wisdom and perspective start emerging...

USNetizen• 12 years ago

Performance in terms of raw speed, maybe, but my cognitive abilities as they are today really only started when I was in my mid-to-late 20's. Speed is no substitute for skill and perspective, which I have learned the hard way many times.

Plus, countless other studies have shown that our "soft skills" (crystallized intelligence) like communication, general knowledge, vocabulary, leadership, inter-personal relations, etc. improve BEGINNING at age 25 and continues growing well into our 60's. I have found this particular intelligence to be of far more value in business than the "speed" of my youth ever was.

baddox3• 12 years ago

With Starcraft, Thompson said, the physical demands are minimal, as the game is played with a keyboard and mouse.

That's a fairly strange way to define "physical demands." It's kind of like saying "for playing guitar, the physical demands are minimal, as it's played with your fingers and perhaps a small pick." Both activities are not just about reflexes and "strategy," because finger strength and muscle memory play a big role in both. Of course, muscle memory occurs (as far as I know) mostly in the brain, but I would still consider that a physical demand distinct from reflexes and strategy.

Mithaldu• 12 years ago

The only important sentence from the article besides the title:

"It appeared the older players compensated for their slower speed by making better use of features such as shortcuts and by using simpler strategies."

brianmcc• 12 years ago

I wonder if there's an extent to which older players have, due to experience, simply more tools at their disposal and it's a form of constant evaluation of the apt ones to use at any given time which contributes to reduction in physical performance.

andrewljohnson• 12 years ago

At the casual level, it's likely that you will never reach a plateau where this study has a measurable effect on your game. A casual gamer will never practice enough such that the rate of cognitive decline couldn't be counter-acted by practice.

You can reach the top quartile of Starcraft 2 players through practice, overall strategy, and learning the current meta-game and tactics. Your twitch muscles only become differentiators at a much higher level than 99% of people will achieve.

iopq2• 12 years ago

top quartile is useless, it's not even master league master league is top 4% and it still doesn't matter there as much

ojbyrne• 12 years ago

Note that the article agrees with many of the comments here about the fact that "cognitive motor performance" isn't everything there is to intelligence...

"I think we're adapting without knowing it," he added. "A lot of us are still able to maintain our skills."

In fact, that held true for older Starcraft players also, when only their score was taken into account.

"We had a lot of people performing at a level higher than their speed would otherwise suggest."

marvin• 12 years ago

I think there is a huge possibility of a methodologial hole here. If older players play better with less pure technical brilliance, this could also be because they have realized that reflexes are less important - and hence spend less time training their reflexes and more on higher-level strategy. Skills are perishable, so this in itself doesn't demonstrate that motor skills deteriorate with age.

I'm reminded of the cliché of the 17-year old guitar player who equates high tempo with good music. A similar study could reach the exact same conclusion in this ield.

FD3SA• 12 years ago

I'm sure Darwin, aged 50 when he finished Origin of Species, would agree.

Perhaps it takes a slow mind for man to think more deeply about problems, in order to arrive at an elegant solution.

Hopefuly a few decades after retiring from professional gaming, these Starcraft 2 players will produce magnum opera of their own.

Blahah4• 12 years ago

Plural of 'magnum opus' is 'magna opera' - the adjective has to take the same case (accusative plural) as the noun.

catshirt• 12 years ago

as a 25 year old spending way too much time playing sc2 this explains a lot

zobzu2• 12 years ago

you were so much better last year. ;-)

ovulator• 12 years ago

It seems that a of these comments are taking offense, and equating cognitive motor performance = intelligence.

The article describes it as: "Cognitive motor performance is how quickly your brain reacts to things happening around you"

Meaning it is measuring your reaction time, you already know what to do in the situation, you don't have to think about it, you react.

Which is why they elderly are so dangerous behind the wheel, they didn't forget how to drive, they know that they can't run the red light, but the amount of time it takes to process that the red light is there and then to press on the break increases.

I find it fascinating that that this decline starts to show so early.

personZ• 12 years ago

I don't think people are taking "offense", but rather smell the faint aroma of yet another non-repeatable study of very dubious quality. There are many very direct, easily quantified and repeated ways of measuring things like response time, StarCraft not being one of them.

DanBC• 12 years ago

I'd be interested to see statistics comparing fatal road traffic accidents for people under 25 and "elderly" people.

kolinko• 12 years ago

Did they control for having a real-life job?

I can easily imagine this effect being due to people having less time to practice, and due to less time spent practicing, and playing more casually due to 8 hours every day spent working.

robryan2• 12 years ago

Well, I think what they are saying is, assuming your opponent has equal game knowledge and practise and in general has a similar overall strategic decision making that a younger person can probably outdo you with the very short term decision making and faster control.

taurath• 12 years ago

Ability to react extremely quickly to a complete unknown situation goes down, I would imagine because there are more situations/memories that an older person's brain needs to query.

devindotcom• 12 years ago

I read this yesterday and rejected it for coverage by us... the small sample size, the single strategy for measurement, the questionable value of that measurement, and the questionable extrapolation of that value all contributed to what I would call some pretty bad science.

tempestn2• 12 years ago

Interesting article, but it's clear they've never played Risk:

"Starcraft 2 is a popular strategy game, similar in concept to Risk, where players compete to build armies and conquer a science fictional world."

It's tough to imagine two games more dissimilar in gameplay than Starcraft II and Risk. Also I'm pretty sure Risk isn't played in a "science fictional world"...

robryan2• 12 years ago

I disagree, at the most basic level they are both about allocating resources most efficiently.

tempestn2• 12 years ago

OK, I should have said they're the most dissimilar strategy games I can imagine.

sologoub• 12 years ago

I'm hoping this article left out a lot of criteria from this description of the methodology:

"The study analyzed the way 3,305 people, aged 16 to 44, played the game against a single random opponent of similar skill, in order to measure the gamers' cognitive motor performance."

The "similar skill" is an incredibly subjective measure. Especially if they relied on the user's scores recorded on battle.net. As someone else noted, they really need to control for the fact that younger people have a lot more free time to play and practice.

A good follow-up study would be to follow a set of gamers for a couple of years as they cross this hypothetical threshold to see if the results still persist and the overall performance decreases.

Of course, they'd need to control for a number of environmental factors and hardware differences, as gaming rigs change quite quickly.

slm_HN• 12 years ago

"Starcraft is like high-speed chess."

Ok, but what's really like high-speed chess is... speed chess, played with a chess clock. Five minute chess, three minute chess and even one minute chess, those are all like high-speed chess.

Selfcommit• 12 years ago

Even chess with a chess clock is like a walk in the park compared to SC2.

In an average game,the first 5 minutes has already decided the match.

a8000• 12 years ago

That is not true at all, the first five minutes will decide most of the early/mid game strategy. But if the build orders are executed flawlessly the match is far from decided at this point.

iopq2• 12 years ago

the problem with that is: Starcraft is really like playing chess on several boards for time and if you run out of time for a move your opponent can make two in a row

this is because you need to be at several locations at once

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

Real time strategy games like starcraft are stupid because of the wasted cycles. The game can grow too complex for even a high capacity sub 24 year old easily. I'd rather program my harvester, grunt, [choose your metaphor] than micromanage them or let real people control them.

orasis• 12 years ago

Alternative Hypothesis: Perhaps older people just don't give as much of a shit.

Cognitive motor performance in Starcraft 2 begins declining at age 24

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