Dr Athanasios Vasileios Kokkinakis

University of York

Videogame Correlates of Real-Life Cognitive Traits

Video-games have been increasingly gaining momentum and popularity, both with the public but also with the scientific world who has seen their usefulness in multiple areas. Researchers have been making bold claims of Videogames increasing Intelligence monopolizing the public’s attention and taking it away from what Videogames are excellent at; serving as diagnostic tools examining constructs such Reaction Times, Memory and fluid Intelligence. The sharp decline of the aforementioned concepts has been linked to multiple diseases such as the prodrome of Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Moreover, their measurement has been linked to important life outcomes such as Academic Achievement, Time in Unemployment, Unwanted Pregnancies and Mathematical Achievement among others. In my doctoral thesis I have correlated these constructs with the massively played video-game League of Legends. By cross-validating Psychometric measurements with Video-game metrics we can possibly identify at risk populations and stage Health Interventions or even identify “gifted” children or children that lag behind at an early age and place them in appropriate training curricula.

He acquired his BSc in Psychology from the University of Bangor and he then went to complete his MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of York. In his first experiment he attempted to see whether “expert video-gamers” would show less Attentional Resources when compared to a control group of non-gamers and whether a short training session of approximately a week had any effects on the non-gamer group. His MSc, although not related to gaming, gave him valuable experience with EEG and MEG which he hopes to incorporate into his future experiments.

In his most recent experiments he correlated psychometric Intelligence with Videogame Scores, more specifically League of Legends Tiers. He believes that these scores may give us insight on multiple developmental trajectories for instance healthy aging.