Video games might offer something beyond sheer entertainment value.
Hours of gaming appear to train the brain to make better and faster decisions from visual information, according to a Duke University study of 125 college students – gamers and non-gamers – run through a series of visual tests.
“Gamers see the world differently,” Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine said in a statement. “They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”
The study involved 125 participants who were did not play games at all or were very intensive gamers. Each study participant performed visual sensory memory tasks where a circular arrangement of eight letters flashed on a screen for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, participants next spotted a green arrow on the screen, pointing to a place on the circle where a letter had been. They were asked to identify which letter was in the designated spot. At each time interval, the active gamers outperformed the non-gamers in remembering the place of the letter.
The study appears in the June edition of the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics. Grant funding supporting the research came from the Army Research Office; the Department of Homeland Security; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA; and Nike Inc.
Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second and then asking the participant to recall a particular letter. An arrow appeared on the screen pointing to the spot on the circle. The time delay between the flash of letters and the green arrow appearing ranged from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds. At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter.
Earlier research by others has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. This is notable in so-called “first-person shooter” games, where the gamer quickly decides who is “good” or “bad” before firing a shot.
With time and experience, gamers apparently get better at making these quick decisions based on visual information, Appelbaum said. Researchers studied three possible reasons for the gamers’ apparently superior ability to make probabilistic inferences. Either they see better, they retain visual memory longer or they’ve improved their decision-making.
Appelbaum said that based on the results it appears that prolonged memory retention isn’t the reason for the better performance. But it’s possible that gamers see more immediately and they are also better able to make correct decisions from the information they have available.
To learn more, the researchers will need to study the brain. They’ll need data from brainwaves and MRI imagery to see where the brains of gamers have been trained to perform differently on visual tasks.
