By Gabriel Perna: Subscribe to Gabriel's RSS feed
September 14, 2010 4:41 PM EDT
Parents who dismiss video games as mindless entertainment with no intrinsic value for their children may not have a leg to stand on anymore thanks to science.
Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester have proven action based video games train people to make quick, accurate decisions. The skills acquired from video games, which helps players develop a heightened sensitivity to their surroundings, can be used in real world applications. This includes multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town.
The study, which appears in "Current Biology," is authored by Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green, all who worked on the study while at the University of Rochester's cognitive science department. Green has since moved to the University of Minnesota. In the report, the trio says certain types of video games, specifically action games, can provide a capable training regimen for speeding up reactions in many types of real-life situations.
"Action games have that kind of effect," Bavelier said. "People who play these action games make informed, better decisions than those who don't. These games keep you on your toes, provide you with a lot of different tasks, while making you maintain long and short term goals."
For the study, the researchers tested a number of young adults who had not played those types of video games beforehand. One group played "Call-of-Duty" and "Unreal Tournament," action packed first person shooters. The other group played the much calmer, strategy based simulation game, "The Sims 2."
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Once this testing period was done, the gamers were put to a series of tests where they had to make quick decisions in order to complete tasks. The researchers tested the gamers visual and auditory perception. The action gamers were 25 percent faster at coming up with a conclusion than those who played the controlled strategy-based "Sims 2." They also answered as many questions correctly as their strategy game playing peers. Bavelier said the differences between the two groups was not just in the after tests either, it occured in gameplay.
"The action gamers improved at their games a lot faster than those who played the controlled games," Bavelier said.
Bavelier said her team used 26 study subjects, 13 who played the action games and 13 who played the strategy game. The study was done over several months to ensure initial results were not fleeting.
The process which allows the action gamers to be more decisive is called probabilistic inference. In probabilistic inference, a person will constantly accumulate small pieces of visual or auditory information as a person surveys a scene.
"The brain is always computing probabilities. As you drive, for instance, you may see a movement on your right, estimate whether you are on a collision course, and based on that probability make a binary decision: brake or don't brake," Bavelier said.
The video game study is part of a long term project for Bavelier and her team. Over the past 10 years, they have been studying different ways to get people to learn better and faster. She said over the years they have learned certain types of video games can be designed to help rehabbing medical patients, train people to become better learners and be used as an educational tool.
Bavelier, a mother of three, admitted this notion goes against her own parental instincts.
"Everytime I see them playing video games I want to tell them to go outside and play. But I do allow some video games," she said.
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