Maybe: Million-dollar milliseconds

An online video game championship has paid out almost $20 million in prize money — placing it among some of the world's most lucrative sports tournaments. But what does it take to play video games at this level? According to University of Queensland researcher Eugene Poh, from the Centre for Sensorimotor Performance at the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences , it's a matter of milliseconds. "While gaming strategies and tactics are important, the ability to react faster than your opponents can be the difference between winning and losing," Mr Poh said. "The eyes take about 200 milliseconds to respond to a stimulus and the time taken to jump around the different targets is around 20-30 milliseconds, depending on the distance between them. "100 milliseconds later, the fingers respond and activate the muscles in the hand, clicking and moving the mouse. "Minimising the delay between identifying potential targets and the execution of the movement is critical in video games" Mr Poh's research focuses on understanding how visual information is integrated with proprioceptive information to produce accurate movements. Particularly in how the availability of visual information at different stages of the movement trajectory can affect the ability to correct movement errors.