A study published this week in the journal Nature offers evidence that action video games can substantially improve players' visual and perceptual acuity. The research was undertaken in the US by scientists who sought to examine the effect of action video games on perceptual and motor skills. They found, through a series of four experiments, that habitual players of action video games -- particularly first-person shooter games -- tend to perceive objects more quickly and are better than non-players at handling simultaneous tasks.
What's more, the researchers worked with people who don't play video games and found that their overall perceptual abilities showed a "marked improvement" after they underwent intensive training on the game "Medal of Honor."
Trainees were required to play the game an hour a day for 10 consecutive days. Afterwards the participants scored higher than average on tests that examined various aspects of attention, including the ability to correctly count a number of objects which had been flashed onto the screen for just a moment. The "Medal of Honor" participants also scored higher than a control group which had been trained on Tetris, a game which requires players to focus on a single object at a time rather than multiple targets, dangers and tasks.
"By forcing players to simultaneously juggle a number of varied tasks (detect new enemies, track existing enemies and avoid getting hurt, among others), action-video-game playing pushes the limits of three rather different aspects of visual attention," wrote the researchers, C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier. "Although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing."
