It may be the age at which our cognitive performance peaks:
That’s the conclusion of a new study in PLoS One published last week by psychology researcher Joseph Thompson and his colleagues at Canada’s Simon Fraser University. The team tracked and measured the performance of 3,305 subjects (between the ages of 16 and 44) who played the nerdy “real-time strategy” computer game StarCraft 2. “Using a piecewise regression analysis, we find that age-related slowing of within-game, self-initiated response times begins at 24 years of age,” the authors write. In other words, older players took longer to respond to new visual playing conditions before taking action. And, according to the study, it was “a significant performance deficit,” which likely has consequences even outside abstruse digital space wars.
The paper does not focus on biological causes, but the authors speculate that the shift might have to do with changing brain “ratios of N-acetylaspartate (NAA) to choline (Cho)” that coincide with the early twenties.
Christopher Ingraham explains why measuring brain power with a computer game isn’t as silly as it sounds:
The game provides an excellent real-world laboratory for testing cognitive ability under pressure.
It’s already used in a University of Florida Honors class to teach “critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making.” In studying game replays, the researchers at Simon Fraser found that “looking-doing latency” – the delay between when a player looked at a new section of the game field, and when they performed an in-game action – is lowest among 24-year-old players. After age 24, that lag only increases as you get older. The researchers calculate that over an average 15-minute game of Starcraft, a 39-year-old player loses 30 seconds to cognitive lag versus a 24-year-old. In a game where performance is measured in hundreds of actions per minute, this is a huge deficit.
The Dish 