Trend: Esports teams harness cognitive tests to better match player to task and to identify training opportunities

Neu­rOlympics is a decep­tive­ly sim­ple test.

The 60-minute assess­ment guides peo­ple through four uncom­pli­cat­ed video games. One involves remem­ber­ing dis­ap­pear­ing icons. Anoth­er is an exer­cise in rapid reac­tion time. A per­son­’s per­for­mance on the test is then run through an algo­rithm that eval­u­ates per­for­mance in mem­o­ry, speed and oth­er characteristics.

Team Liq­uid, a pro esports team with head­quar­ters in Cal­i­for­nia and the Nether­lands, thinks Neu­rOlympics results may hold the key to win­ning match­es in League of Leg­ends, Val­o­rant and more than a dozen oth­er games in the pro circuit.

The team’s man­agers use the results to deter­mine whether a play­er is a fit for the typ­i­cal­ly five-per­son squads and what role he or she might fit best in. Armed with an under­stand­ing of play­er behav­ior, Team Liq­uid’s staff also sees Neu­rOlympics as a way to tai­lor coach­ing to bet­ter nur­ture tal­ent and skills…

The NFL long used the Won­der­lic test, a 50-ques­tion mul­ti­ple choice test devised in 1934, to gauge the intel­li­gence of prospec­tive play­ers, though it was retired ahead of this year’s scout­ing com­bine, which will use the com­put­er-based Play­er Assess­ment Tests. Matt Ryan, an NFL quar­ter­back, has used cog­ni­tive train­ing sys­tem Neu­ro­Track­er to refine his sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness. –> Keep read­ing arti­cle over at CNET.