Monday, September 13, 2010
Video Games Lead to Faster Decisions That Are No Less Accurate
From University of Rochester
Do video games make you smarter and faster? Recent research shows it’s possible they do.
Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester have discovered that playing action video games trains people to make the right decisions
faster.
Video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, making them better at a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities.
The study in the journal Current Biology suggests that video games could provide a potent training regimen for speeding up reactions in many types of real-life situations.
68 percent of American households have members that play video games.
The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players. Half of them were assigned to play an fast-paced action game called “Call of Duty,” or another called “Unreal Tournament.” The other half played the slow-moving “Sims 2.”
After a training period, subjects were asked to look at a screen and analyze what was going on, and answer a simple question about the action in as little time as possible (i.e. whether a clump of erratically moving dots was migrating right or left across the screen on average).
The results showed that the players who trained on the fast-paced action games had better accuracy, and faster responses in the test.
Read the full article here.
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