There are lots of headline grabbing stories about negative effects of gaming but there are a growing number of studies showing positive effects of video games. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Vikranth Bejjanki and colleaguesr demonstrates that the playing of action video games – the sort of fast-paced, 3D shoot-em-up beloved of doomsayers in the media – confirms what other studies have revealed, that players show improved performance in perception, attention, and cognition.
In a series of experiments on small numbers of gamers (10 to 14 people in each study), the researchers reported that gamers with previous experience of playing such action video games were better at perceptual tasks such as pattern discrimination than gamers with less experience.
In another experiment, they trained gamers that had little previous experience of playing action games, giving them 50 hours practice. It was showed that these gamers performed much better on perceptual tasks than they had prior to their training. The paper concludes:
The enhanced learning of the regularity and structure of environments may act as a core mechanism by which action video game play influences performance in perception, attention, and cognition.
Thanks to Tom Llewellyn for finding this and Mark Griffiths for the text!
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