Slashdot Mirror
Video Games Boost Visual Skills
cmburns69 writes "A new study published in Nature Magazine (MSNBC summary) suggests that playing action games improves visual skills. Among other things, young adults who played action games such as Grand Theft Auto and Medal of Honor regularly could track up to five objects at a time - 30% more than non-players. Apparently, the game type is important, as ten hours of the block-rotating game Tetris failed to improve test scores."
Salon's version of the story says they did account for that (by testing a group of non-gamers along with the gamers). The non-gamers didn't benefit from Tetris but did benefit from the fast-action games.
from https://msds.open.ac.uk:
Eyes and eyesight
There's no evidence that working with display screen equipment is harmful to the eyes, nor that it makes visual problems worse, although a few people who have difficulties with their sight may become more aware of them. But working at a screen for a long time without a break can have effects similar to reading or writing uninterruptedly, and may make your eyes feel 'tired' or sore. You might find that it helps to look away from the screen from time to time and focus your eyes on a distant object.
Friends, ever heard of hand-eye coordination? It's just another way of saying "visual skills." Hand-eye coordination was first hyped in the 80s as a benefit of videogaming. Here is a USA Today article that makes mention of that "benefit." (BTW, I'm putting the word in quotation marks because I'm wondering how important it is to have good visual skills/hand-eye coordination. Does that benefit truly outweigh all the damn time we hard-core gamers waste?)
Exactly. The trick is to assume that everyone on the road will do the stupidest thing possible, because they probably will.
Learn tracking even more objects with juggling.org.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
They did do this, if you go read the full text of the article (linked off their lab webpage here) you can see exactly what the experiments were and what their claims are.
For those of you who don't want to read a scientific journal article, basically what they did was to have non-gamers play MOHAA for 10 days straight, an hour a day, and they then re-tested the non-gamers using the same tests and they did remarkably better.
"They just did better because they had already done it" you say? Another control group of non-gamers played tetris (not very demanding) for the same period, one hour a day, and they got NO better when they performed the experiments again.
I don't fault you for not knowing this because there was no way to read the full text article unless you paid Nature, or live with the experimenter and have access to the paper and know where the PDF resides. (It helps that the main researcher is my roomate and i was a subject in the study)
side note: the experimenters did not claim that this leads to better driving, they claim that it shows that people who play FPPOV games can better focus on multiple objects in their field of view, especially items in your periphery...and yes, this SHOULD then logically mean they are better able to process quickly moving and changing objects in their field of view, objects that are very common while driving a car.
My Sig is Sauer.