Cognitive Skills Decline from the Age of 24, Especially on StarCraft 2

Okay, I admit when I saw this headline, my first thought was, "Well, sh!t, that was nearly half a lifetime ago. I'm screwed." Fortunately, I know better than to trust headlines (which is why I changed it for the title of this post). The study is based on ability to play a video game called StarCraft 2.

The younger the players the better their skills on 5 specific measures:

• Looking-doing latency (similar to reaction time)
• Dual-task performance
• Total reported hours of StarCraft 2 experience
• Effective use of hotkeys
• Effective management of view-screens/maps

The older players, however, adapted to their reaction time limitations and remained competitive.

"Older players, though slower, seem to compensate by employing simpler strategies and using the game's interface more efficiently than younger players, enabling them to retain their skill, despite cognitive motor-speed loss."

So maybe I am over the hill for video game play, but that's cool. I would not trade the experience and wisdom I have now for youth for any amount of money.

Our cognitive skills decline from the age of 24, but there is hope

Saturday 19 April 2014 

Written by David McNamee 

  If you are an adult who has ever been told by a partner or colleague that you are "too old to be playing video games," then they may well have a point. A new study - using a video game as a test - has found that people over the age of 24 are past their peak in terms of cognitive motor performance.

Generally, the researchers behind the new study observe, people tend to think of middle age as being around 45 years of age - around the time when age-related declines in cognitive-motor functioning become obvious.

But there is evidence that our memory and speed relating to cognitive tasks peak much earlier in our lives.

However, data on this is limited because most scientific studies examining the relationship of cognitive motor performance and aging focus on elderly populations, rather than when the decline in performance actually begins.

The authors note that some researchers have investigated the origins of cognitive motor performance decline but have only used simple reaction time tasks to measure performance. 

The new study - carried out by two doctoral students from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, and their thesis supervisor - is built around a large-scale social science experiment involving the real-time space-faring strategy game StarCraft 2.

The data for the study came from the researchers replaying and analyzing 870 hours of gameplay from 3,305 StarCraft 2 players aged between 16 and 44.

How can StarCraft 2 be used to measure cognitive motor performance?

In the game, players have to successfully manage their civilization's economy and military growth, with the objective of tactically defeating their opponent's army.

All aspects of gameplay occur in real time, so the player is required to make a large number of adjustments continuously, and they must carefully make decisions and develop overall strategies in a manner that the researchers compare to chess or managing an emergency.

Attention to detail and fast reaction time are both important components of successful gameplay.



Attention to detail and fast reaction time are both important components of successful StarCraft 2 gameplay.
The researchers analyzed the following variables of gameplay:

• Looking-doing latency (similar to reaction time)
• Dual-task performance
• Total reported hours of StarCraft 2 experience
• Effective use of hotkeys
• Effective management of view-screens/maps.

Complex statistical modeling then allowed the researchers to arrive at meaningful results relating to the players' game behaviors and response time.

"After around 24 years of age, players show slowing in a measure of cognitive speed that is known to be important for performance," reveals lead author and doctoral student Joe Thompson. "This cognitive performance decline is present even at higher levels of skill." 

But there is hope yet for you older gamers. Because - parallel to the cognitive performance decline in the over-24 year olds - Thompson and his colleagues noticed the older players adapting naturally to their cognitive disadvantages.

"Our research tells a new story about human development," claims Thompson.

"Older players, though slower, seem to compensate by employing simpler strategies and using the game's interface more efficiently than younger players, enabling them to retain their skill, despite cognitive motor-speed loss."

By efficiently manipulating the use of hotkeys and multiple screens, the older players were able to make up for their delayed speed in executing real-time commands.

"Our cognitive-motor capacities are not stable across our adulthood," suggests Thompson, "but are constantly in flux." He considers that the results of this study - his doctorate thesis, which is published in PLOS One - demonstrate how "our day-to-day performance is a result of the constant interplay between change and adaptation."

In January, Medical News Today reported on a study that linked slow reaction time to risk of early death.

Full Citation:

Thompson, JJ, Blair, MR, and Henry, AJ. (2014, Apr 9). Over the Hill at 24: Persistent Age-Related Cognitive-Motor Decline in Reaction Times in an Ecologically Valid Video Game Task Begins in Early Adulthood. PLOS One. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094215

Here is the abstract to the study (you can read the whole study by following the link below):

Over the Hill at 24: Persistent Age-Related Cognitive-Motor Decline in Reaction Times in an Ecologically Valid Video Game Task Begins in Early Adulthood

Joseph J. Thompson, Mark R. Blair, Andrew J. Henrey

Published: April 09, 2014
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094215

Abstract

Typically studies of the effects of aging on cognitive-motor performance emphasize changes in elderly populations. Although some research is directly concerned with when age-related decline actually begins, studies are often based on relatively simple reaction time tasks, making it impossible to gauge the impact of experience in compensating for this decline in a real world task. The present study investigates age-related changes in cognitive motor performance through adolescence and adulthood in a complex real world task, the real-time strategy video game StarCraft 2. In this paper we analyze the influence of age on performance using a dataset of 3,305 players, aged 16-44, collected by Thompson, Blair, Chen & Henrey [1]. Using a piecewise regression analysis, we find that age-related slowing of within-game, self-initiated response times begins at 24 years of age. We find no evidence for the common belief expertise should attenuate domain-specific cognitive decline. Domain-specific response time declines appear to persist regardless of skill level. A second analysis of dual-task performance finds no evidence of a corresponding age-related decline. Finally, an exploratory analyses of other age-related differences suggests that older participants may have been compensating for a loss in response speed through the use of game mechanics that reduce cognitive load.

David Krakauer - Cognitive Ubiquity: The Evolution of Intelligence on Earth

This series of video lectures comes from the Santa Fe Institute's Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series (2011 edition). In three lectures, SFI Professor David Krakauer explored the extraordinarily convergent theories from mathematics, physics, computation, and biology describing the emergence of intelligence, and speculates about the future for biological intelligence in a world of distributed thinking machines.

This is his Research Quasi-Statement

My research is concerned with the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture, with an emphasis on robust information transmission, signaling dynamics and their role in constructing novel, higher level features. The research spans several levels of organization finding analogous processes in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organismal behavior and society. At the cellular level I have been interested in molecular processes, which rely on volatile, error-prone, asynchronous, mechanisms, which can be used as a basis for decision making and patterning. I also investigate how signaling interactions at higher levels, including microbial and organismal, are used to coordinate complex life cycles and social systems, and under what conditions we observe the emergence of proto-grammars. Much of this work is motivated by the search for 'noisy-design' principles in biology and culture emerging through evolutionary dynamics that span hierarchical structures. In addition to general principles there is a need to provide an explicit theory of evolutionary history, a theory of memory accounting for those incompressible regularities revealed once the regular components have been subtracted.

Research projects includes work on the molecular logic of signaling pathways, the evolution of genome organization (redundancy, multiple encoding, quantization and compression), robust communication over networks, the evolution of distributed forms of biological information processing, dynamical memory systems, the logic of transmissible regulatory networks (such as virus life cycles) and the many ways in which organisms construct their environments (niche construction). Thinking about niche constructing niches provides us with a new perspective on the major evolutionary transitions.

Many of these areas are characterized by the need to encode heritable information (genetic, epigenetic, auto-catalytic or linguistic) at distinct levels of biological organization, where selection pressures are often independent or in conflict. Furthermore, components are noisy and degrade and interactions are typically diffusively coupled. At each level I ask how information is acquired, stored, transmitted, replicated, transformed and robustly encoded. With collaborators I am engaged in projects applying insights from biological information processing to electronic, engineered systems.

The big question that many of us are asking is what will evolutionary theory look like once it has become integrated with the sciences of adaptive information, and of course, what will these sciences then look like?

I am Professor at SFI, and Chair of the Faculty for the period 2009-2011.

This stuff is a bit geeky, but it's also very cool. Follow the links below to see each of the three videos (or download them from iTunesU with the link provided.

Video: Cognitive ubiquity - The evolution of intelligence on Earth

Sept. 12, 2011 2:35 p.m.

Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series

From the formation of the earth from interstellar dust it has taken just under five billion years for matter to be able to speculate about its own origins. But how did intelligence come to be, and what is intelligence anyway?

In three SFI Community Lectures over three nights, SFI Professor David Krakauer explored the extraordinarily convergent theories from mathematics, physics, computation, and biology describing the emergence of intelligence, and speculates about the future for biological intelligence in a world of distributed thinking machines.

Download the lecture videos here via iTunesU.

Watch Part One: "The adversarial quartet" (69 minutes, Tuesday, August 30, 2011) - Starting with our efforts to define and measure order and intelligence, Krakauer surveys key ideas from the history of mathematics, physics, computation, and biology that have extraordinarily converged on very similar explanations for adaptive behavior.

Watch Part Two: "Invasion of the inferential cell" (84 minutes, Wednesday, August 31, 2011) - Krakauer recounts the evolution of life on Earth focusing on the advent of increasingly complex forms of behavior and thought, identifying the common principles of intelligent biological systems.

Watch Part Three: "All watched over by machines of loving grace" (92 minutes, Thursday, September 1, 2011) - Krakauer considers the future of biological intelligence in a world of distributed machine intelligence, where there is a prospect of new cultural mechanisms capable of eclipsing the analytical capabilities of our own species.

SFI’s Ulam Memorial Lecture series is named for Polish mathematician and Manhattan Project contributor Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984).

The 2011 Ulam Lectures were generously underwritten by the Peters Family Foundation. Support for SFI's 2011 Community Lecture series is provided by Los Alamos National Bank.

• Listen to an interview with Krakauer on KSFR's Radio Cafe (August 30, 2011)
• Read the Santa Fe New Mexican article (August 30, 2011)

---

Krakauer's suggested reading list follows:

Part One

• The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, by Georges Ifrah (2005)
• Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, by Michael S. Gazzaniga (2011)
• Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind, by Gerald M. Edelman (1993)
• I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas R. Hofstadter (2008)
• The Mismeasure of Man (revised & expanded), by Stephen Jay Gould (paperback - June 17, 1996)

Part Two

• The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, by Terrence W. Deacon (paperback - April 17, 1998)
• Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of Mind), by Andy Clark (hardcover - October 29, 2008)
• Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, by Nicholas Humphrey (hardcover - February 20, 2011)
• Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell, by Dennis Bray (paperback - March 1, 2011)

Part Three

• Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, by Diego Rasskin-Gutman and Deborah Klosky (hardcover - July 10, 2009)
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch (hardcover - July 21, 2011)
• The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, by Brian Christian (hardcover - March 1, 2011)
• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Vintage), by Jaron Lanier (February 8, 2011)
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr (June 6, 2011)