Video games have been claimed to be a source of many problems, they have even been blamed for violent behavior in children. A new study says, though, that they might actually have a beneficial effect on our brains – playing fast paced video games can make us learn better, the Washington Post writes.
A study published this month by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that playing video games can boost our ability to multitask, perform cognitive tasks like rotating objects in our minds, focus and retain information, and even improve our vision. Daphne Bavelier, research professor in brain and cognitive sciences at both the University of Rochester and the University of Geneva, says this is due our brains’ ability to model and predict the future. “In order to sharpen its prediction skills, our brains constantly build models, or ‘templates,’ of the world,” she explained. “The better the template, the better the performance. And now we know playing action video game actually fosters better templates.”
Bavelier and her team have used pattern discrimination tasks to compare the visual performance of those playing action video games to those not involved in such activities, and have concluded that action games’ players have performed better. Next they recruited people with little to no video game experience and asked them to play video games for 50 hours over the course of nine weeks. One group played fast paced action video games (like Call of Duty, for example), while the other played non-action games like The Sims. Both groups were tested on a pattern discrimination task before and after their “training”. The results show that those playing action video games have improved their templates more compared to those not playing action games, and were able to build and fine tune templates quicker.
Learning means developing a template in our brain, and the faster and better these templates can be developed, the faster and better the person learns. Playing action video games improves this ability our brain has, as the results show, leading to an accelerated learning curve. And the effect is lasting, the researchers say – several months later the action video game players were tested, and again outperformed those not playing those games in the tests.
To read the full study click here.