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Video Games Found To Enhance Visual Attention
donniebaseball23 writes "Reporting on new research from WIREs Cognitive Science, IndustryGamers writes: 'Action games like Call of Duty and Halo can enhance visual attention, the ability that helps us focus on relevant visual information. The mental mechanism allows people to select pertinent visual information and ignore irrelevant information. It suggests that action titles can be used to augment military training, educational tools, and correct visual deficits.' Shawn Green, co-author of the study, commented, 'At the core of these action video game-induced improvements appears to be a remarkable enhancement in the ability to flexibly and precisely control attention, a finding that could have a variety of real-world applications. For example, those in professions that demand "super-normal" visual attention, such as fighter pilots, would benefit enormously from enhanced visual attention, as their performance and lives depend on their ability to react quickly and accurately to primarily visual information."
I hear "zug zug".
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
What about ANGBAND??? Surely the hours I've poured into that have improved me in some way? Surely???
Another mental mechanism is telling me that there is some irrelevant redundancy above.
Because you'll need that extra visual attention for all the violence the video game will cause you to do.
/troll
Most of the gamers I know pass the following test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
The impression that I get after seeing training and hearing stories from vets who used to be in the profession & friends is that its more about planning than quick reaction time. "A reactive pilot dies, a proactive pilot lives." It doesn't matter if you need to turn immediately, your body can't take the G's that the jet exerts if you've already put yourself in that poor of a situation. On a side note, the job takes a serious toll on the body and is certainly not as glamorous as a lot of people make it out to be.
However, I can't think of any better examples of professions, so maybe they are on the money.
video games make children violent? Soon we'll start having visually attentive murderers...
Repeated, focused operation of a bodily function just might reduce the time between intent and achievement. Or, in other words, a muscle is a muscle.
Woot! Playing Urban Terror is good for me.
It would be a failure if it replies on other forms of attentions.
And the reality is that vision is the most important perception.
I'd like to see a study on gamers' driving records compared to non gamers. Are gamers better at driving? Worse?
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porn does quite the same thing
I was reading an article about a year ago that was comparing soliders from urban areas and rural areas. Video game use is obviously fairly universal among enlistment age males. The hypothesis that was stated was that the soliders who had played video games would be more alert and more effective on patrol. It turned out to be the exact opposite. The kids who played games were more of a liability because their attention was narrowly focused and they would have problems recognizing things that were out of place. On the other hand, the "rural" enlistees who hunted and spent time outside significantly out performed the urban "video game" kids when it came to noticing IEDs and other threats.
I played all my games without sound for years, relying solely on constant visual awareness, and it has definitely increased my ability to focus on my surroundings in day to day life. Playing major titles muted is definitely the way to go if you want to use them to train your eyes.
the results must be wrong ;)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Ric Romero reports: frequently doing something that requires skill will improve your skill! Its called: practice.
Back in the day when Quake1/2/3 was popular and I played a lot I noticed enhanced hand-eye coordination among other things. One was that I was able to grab flies out of the air with my hand with an almost 100% success rate. Pretty much while doing anything I could react faster and more accurately. Similar to this article, I had an enhanced sense of awareness, noticing even very small and/or fast moving objects.
That applies to tons of other situations for other reason. Motorcycle riding is a good example. Virtually all of the times when a rider ends up getting creamed it's in a situation that's known to go bad. Left turners being one of the more common. If you wait until you're about to be hit, it's too late, you often can't turn a motorcycle fast enough to avoid it if you're not already on it.
But then again with good visual attention you're more likely to spot that a situation is about to go bad sooner, thus permitting more room and planning planning to handle it. A 'gamer' might spot a dangerous situation 5 seconds before it happens, a nongamer might only spot it 4 seconds (or even less) before. That last second can depending on the situation be the difference between life and death.
I can home in on things I'm looking for very quickly, but I think my attention to detail suffers as a result of always tackling large volumes of information breadth-first instead of depth-first.
For example if I'm scanning a page of information with a lot of critical information, I skim it and miss what I'm looking for, skim again and miss it again, and it takes awhile before I realize I'm never going to find what I'm looking for this way. Eventually I settle down and read it carefully from the top and find what I needed.
Yes, I'm using text as the situation while the article discusses visual information, but I feel that I use the same mental "search-mode" for both situations. I tune out the immediate situation slightly and bring everything into equal portions of general awareness. Then the mind does all the unconscious processing, and I snap directly to points of interest.
Being highly attuned to distraction is useful in games. Hearing the faint report of a footstep/gunshot in the distance is a clue that most people don't pick up on when there's a tornado of gunfire and explosions right next to them. I log all that information in and prepare for my second and third steps while others are completely consumed by their immediate situation.
But it's a big hindrance when I'm trying to parse a long complex concept from my books, and my attention snaps to a car trunk being closed 2 houses down. Or tracking a truck going down the highway. Or the ping of the metal flexing in the hot air vent. It takes me a long time to focus, and it's easy for me to lose that focus too.
I think having concentration and single-minded focus will take most people farther in life than a broad and light attention span. The economy is really geared to favor specialists who have to absorb large amounts of complex detail, be it from a book, or from a craft.
since I am cramming everything that needs to be done thanks to video games. How I wish it can help keep myself awake in the office after playing till late nights though.
I hadn't played FPS games for quite a few years but I credit the skills they developed for successfully navigating autoroute 40 in Montreal. Noticing relevant signs while dodging cars just a half meter away got my family through alive. No achievements awarded (except being alive and not trading paint), but autoroute 40 is definitely the expert level, compared to easy level aka autoroute 20. I'm an experienced Toronto driver, but things are different enough in Montreal to make you have to fall back to skill sets learned in twitch fests. No offense to Montreal drivers; I'm sure if one is familiar with the driving culture it all makes sense, but, damn, cut the folks with the Ontario plates some slack :)
Driving in general is that way, whether professional or just out on the street (though it does go doubly so for bikes). Anyway, the way Sir Jackie Stewart explained it on Top Gear is you should think of a car's suspension like a skittish dog. If you approach it gently and predictably, it will behave well. If you do something sudden and rash, it'll bite you. Reflexes are almost useless in most driving situations, because the car will not react optimally every time you do something sudden and jerky instead of smooth and in control. Anticipation by reading other drivers and traffic and then taking preemptive action is always preferable to counting strictly on reflexes.
Not true. You are ideally suited to managing fast paced processes. You just apparently haven't found the niche that pays off yet. I can do both. Probably not as good as some at either.
I believe at the moment that it is a left vs right brain activity.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Just because hunting and being outside is more effective at developing military patrol skills than video games are, it doesn't necessarily follow that video games are not effective. They could simply be less effective. Plus, the example quoted in the summary was fighter jet pilots. That sort of task is highly visual in a very different way and I would imagine that at times, modern HUDs resemble video games. Not to mention that, as I have heard, there are several flight simulation games that actually require you to know how to operate all of the equipment in the cockpit for the plane you are flying. I'd like to see a study that specifically controlled for experience at THOSE types of games, not just "Halo" or something stupid. I don't know of any FPS, even amongst the more realistic ones than Halo, that require you to know how to actually operate an M-16, AK-47, Colt .45, or whatever else they put in the hands of the player.
Being in the Air Force and piloting an F-16 is a very different task than being in the Army and patrolling the latrines.
I realize that the Army doesn't just patrol the latrines but it rhymes so I couldn't help myself ;-)
Also don't forget that the skills mentioned in the summary aren't just useful in the military. Enhanced visual attention could be useful to someone who performed robotic open-heart surgery, or a designer who uses AutoCAD to engineer low-cost hydroponic farm equipment. The world doesn't ALWAYS have to be about war, death and destruction, you know ;-)
If it has a military application, it's good, and money will be thrown at it.
So doing $something a lot improves your skill in doing $something_similar?
Whodathunkit!?!?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All 1500 hours of Team Fortress 2 has brought me is a habit of looking at the top of a person's head first.
all 1500 hours of Team Fortress 2 gave me was a habit of looking at the top of people's heads first
Waving your mouse around to simulate having a natural FOV doesn't train you to actually use your natural pheripheal vision, and it does sound logical that it might in fact cause it to decay.
Emotions! In your brain!
True story! I believe that my passion for FPS like Call of Duty are largely responsible for saving my life and that of my family. It was only because of quick reaction time (out of my peripheral) that I noticed a SUV about to sideswipe me coming off a side road and because I am so used to adjusting my vision quickly to scope into windows and whatnot off the left and right of the screen when im gaming (attention to my peripheral vision was always lacking)i was able to swerve to the opposite lane as the truck screeched to a halt. Had i not swerved the SUV would have taken my girlfriend or my 5 month old out and likely caused more damage as the vehical spun around from the impact. I really do believe that my adoration of Call of Duty improved my reflexes, and my ability to see out of my periphery(sp).
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
Well, the examples they used do have multiplayer, while Angband doesn't. And they do talk about training your filtering _relevant_ information.
And if it's one thing that my days of counter-strike and other multiplayer FPS-es taught me, the only relevant information, the only thing that another player needs to know on a given map is (A) his mother's weight, (B) her sexual exploits, and (C) his real sexuality. At least that's what everyone was telling me, anyway. I came in expecting stuff like, you know, strategies to use, or who must lay suppression fire for whom and when, but got quickly disabused of the notion that such thing matter. The only thing I was left afterwards was a horribly complicated graph of who fucked whose mom, and how many hundreds of pounds did she weigh ;)
Also, that buying a sniper rifle equals coming out of the closet. And your mom suddenly doubles in weight and becomes more sexually active, or something ;)
Also that older fat women are uber-sexy, the way everyone was calling someone else's mom fat _and_ bragging about fucking her. I think we should get the fashion industry to play FPS, because they're doing something wrong using only thin models ;)
So, anyway, until such time as Angband gets a mod to stimulate your ability to filter such relevant information, I'm affraid it doesn't count ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think further development of this is a great idea. The fact that is has the possibilites for real world application should be a major factor in further continuing the research. With all the distractions out there in the world anything that can hone in on and help people focus on the relvant information immediately around them would be a big benefit. Thats just for the every day man or women. But, when applying it to very stressful jobs or ones with very technicals demands the positive outcomes could be far reaching. I hope to see this more of this in the future.