Published 15:02 IST, April 12th 2020
Playing video games help in cognitive development, says study
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience suggest that playing certain games can cause long-term changes in the brain and lead to an improvement.
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Frontiers in Human Neuroscience suggest that playing certain games can cause long-term changes in the brain and lead to an improvement in temporal visual selective attention.
Video games beneficial in the long run
A study by the journal showed that behavioural research showed that action video gaming experience is related to improvements in cognitive abilities that are highly relevant to visual selective attention. For example, action video gaming experts outperformed non-experts in tasks of detecting and tracking fast-moving objects, identifying central and peripheral visual stimuli, feature search and conjunction search, flanker compatibility, enumeration, and useful field of view. Furthermore, action video gaming training was found to improve performance on a useful field of view task.
Diankun Gong, study researcher from University of Electronic Science and Technology in China said, "Our aim was to evaluate the long-term effect of experience with action real-time strategy games on temporal visual selective attention. In particular, we wanted to reveal the time course of cognitive processes during the attentional blink task, a typical task used by neuroscientists to study visual selective attention."
Neuroscience research has also examined the effects of action video gaming experience on Visual Selective Attention (VSA). For example, moving distractors elicited less activation of the visual motion-sensitive areas related to the suppression process in action video gaming experts than in non-experts, suggesting that experts more efficiently allocate attentional resources and filter irrelevant information.
To study the effect of gaming, an experiment was conducted on 38 volunteers. The volunteers were seated in front of a screen and tested a 'blink test' since the tendency of focused observers to "blink" - that is, to fail to properly register - a visual stimulus if it appears so quickly after a previous stimulus that cognitive processing of the first hasn't finished).
The greater a volunteer's tendency to "blink" targets, the less frequently he would press the correct button when one of the two targets appeared on the screen, and the worse he did overall in the task.
"We found that expert League of Legend players outperformed beginners in the task. The experts were less prone to the blink effect, detecting targets more accurately and faster, and as shown by their stronger P3b, gave more attentional cognitive resources to each target," said co-author Dr Weiyi Ma, Assistant Professor in Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Arkansas, USA.
15:02 IST, April 12th 2020