A new 30-week study tracked 68 university students who had almost no previous gaming experience.
Participants were divided into two groups:
>One played League of Legends for one hour per day, five days a week.
>The second group followed the exact same schedule but played Legends of the Three Kingdoms, a non-action strategy card game.
Both groups improved in attention, working memory, and executive function, but the League of Legends players showed significantly stronger gains, especially in spatial attention and spatial working memory.
EEG brain activity scans also confirmed greater improvements in information processing efficiency for the League of Legends group.
These cognitive benefits remained noticeable 10 weeks after the gaming sessions ended.
Important context is that this research involved only healthy young adults and could not fully account for outside influences such as academic workload or personal motivation.