Gamers quicker at making accurate decisions
Researchers in Rochester (New York) have conducted a study looking gamers and the effect playing games has on their cognitive abilities.
The researchers tested dozens of 18 to 25 year-olds who were not normally game players. They split the subjects into two groups. One group played 50 hours of the “Call of Duty 2″ and “Unreal Tournament”, the other group played 50 hours of “The Sims 2″.
After the hours where clocked up the participants were subjected to a series of tasks involving making quick decisions based on visual information and separately questions based on sound.
The group playing COD and Unreal where 25% faster and answered correct as many times as those playing The Sims.
“It’s not the case that the action game players are trigger-happy and less accurate: They are just as accurate and also faster,” Bavelier said. “Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference.
With that news, I think I can justify late night COD sessions as brain training ! Just a shame University funding deprived the players of Modern Warfare.
Source: www.rochester.edu
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Doesn’t surprise me, tbh. Those games train you in quick decision making!
On a similar note, I attribute my reading and writing skills to years of playing the text-based Final Fantasy games!
Like anything I guess practice makes perfect, processing visual and auditory information if you are not used to it would benefit from stimulus.
As a species we are very adaptable to environment and if we choose to subject our brains to games I would have thought this would be the obvious conclusion. It ties in with the stories of keyhole surgeons being better if they are used to operating game controllers. Let alone the US army that actually use the Xbox 360 controller to fly their drones.