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Video Gamers See the World Differently
trendspotter points out this research from Duke University:
"Hours spent at the video gaming console not only train a player's hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers (abstract). 'Gamers see the world differently,' said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. 'They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.' ... Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot. At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter."
Breaking news: gamers better at playing games.
Mostly because I was a long time gamer before I signed up for a psychology experiment.(This was in the early 90's.) They'd flash a single wordson the monitor and see which ones I could or couldn't read.(I forget what they were testing with the words since it's been so long.) To make a long story short they couldn't use me for the experiment because I could always read the words even if flashed for 1 frame. (1/60th of a second or 15milliseconds) I told the psych professor it was probably because I played so many video games.(Which was the only thing that made sense to me since you have to respond to very quick visual stimuli.) Actually this sucked because I signed up for the experiment in the first place because we had to do a couple hours of participating in experiments for the psych class I was taking and basically I wasted an hour on this and got no credit.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I thought they sat in a dark room all day with a black t-shirt that says do not expose to sun.
The first few layers of the visual cortex are highly malleable. Wear a set of glasses that flip the world upside down (or angle the field of view by 10 degrees) and the system will adapt within a couple of days - the user will see the world as normal.
But also - when the user stops wearing the glasses the system quickly adapts back.
With all this fluidity, I suspect that a gamer's heightened sense of perception will dissipate if they stop playing games. At a guess this would probably take about 6 weeks.
There's nothing preventing a video game player from playing in sports and having adequate physical activity. After all, even extreme athletes know there is a rest period.
God spoke to me
Does gaming make you better at these tests or is it just that people that have these particular skills tend to gravitate to action video games?
When I was a busy salesman driving around my city I used FPSs to keep my reaction times low and situational awareness sharp. Where I live the traffic is the worst/deadliest in our area so I felt like I needed something to give me an advantage. I drove on this route for six years and 35,000 miles without a ticket or accident. Not that I didn't come close a few times.
Slightly faster reactions to a visual input is a poor tradeoff for reduced person to person social interaction and physical activity.
I dunno... this kind of skill could pay off big when the aliens take over and put us all to work at "spot the letter", to generate energy for their [technobabble].
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There's nothing preventing a video game player from playing in sports and having adequate physical activity. After all, even extreme athletes know there is a rest period.
Yes, but do extreme gamers know that?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There's been other similar prior work. For example, there's evidence that gamers can quickly allocate their attention in an efficient fashion. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680769/ and that gamers have faster reaction times for a large variety of tasks http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/18/6/321.short.
Gestalt psychology would suppose that the brain processes information with the ability to fill in gaps so to speak, or to quote Kurt Koffka, "The whole is other than the sum of the parts." One of the gestalt "laws" of grouping, that of symmetry, is that object of similar grouping will be perceived as formed around a center point.
Gamers have the benefit of using the natural fixation point of our retinas in an enhanced way (or rather in a more methodical fashion); "focus" as abstract as that means in cognition, can still be more or less analyzed as a gradient via intentness of this point in the types of exercises this study put the subjects. Thus, it would lead to more clarity in the immediate vicinity of this area of focus.
To bring things to a more salient point, the concept of the simple harmonic oscillator (as a quantum function) of the brain would touch on how the fine-tuning of this fixation point awareness would lead to essentially cutting milliseconds off of certain neuronic processes between the optic nerve and the visual cortex. Thus, whether the effects are temporary or not this is still relevant in our understanding of the gestalt.
Forget those amateurs! I could identify the letter AND shoot it in one shot! I hear that's an achievement.
Seems that you like to conform to Daily Mail/Fox news stereotypes. I've just come back from the Lake District with a group of my friends who have a wide variety of professions, It professionals, business owners, accountants, tree surgeons etc.. who enjoy mountaineering, canoeing, swimming need I go on? No anti social fat basement dwellers there. The only thing that we all had in common apart from knowing each other before hand, is a over of computer games since childhood.
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
They should make it so the first post cannot be anonymous.
Interestingly, the researchers also noted that, despite the lack of anonymity, gamers exhibited a higher rate of verbal abuse of other participants who failed to complete the given task successfully. This rate was shown to be independent of the gamer's biological age, ethnicity and social class, but a correlation appeared when plotted against the gamer's online age. The rate of abuse also increased as the gamers became more confident in their ability to outperform other participants.
The researchers have therefore proposed the following refinement of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: it is not anonymity per se but rather the expected impunity which is required to demonstrate the greater internet fuckwad theory. To confirm this, the gamers were divided into two groups and electric shocks were administered in response to abuse. At low voltages the rate of abuse unexpectedly increased and was directed at the researches, but as the voltage was increased above a certain per-gamer threshold, the abuse suddenly stopped. The authors have not provided further details due to time constraints and could not be reached for questioning.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum, and I used to play games like *Psssst*. I have always felt that I was better at moving through thick crowds because of this. My wife always takes the wrong ways through crowds, moving to the places with most people, whereas I see al the holes in the crowd.
Who decides that it's a poor tradeoff? That's absolutely subjective.
They should make it so the first post cannot be anonymous.
It should come with a first post pre attached.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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It causes bad drivers.
The place I see this effect is driving home from the AMC 20 in Santa Clara on 101, and the idiots in the rice rockets who (A) thing they are playing a video game, (B) think that video game physics perfectly mirror reality, so things that work there work in the meat word, and (C) think everyone else drives the same way they do, so it's OK to drive that way because the only people who will get in accidents are the people who don't play the game as well as they play it.
Personally, If I were a CHP, I'd fill my monthly no-such-thing-as-a-quota on Friday and Saturday night, and maybe Sunday, if it was a 3 day weekend, and then take the rest of the week off and windsurf. Instead, these guys simply don't get pulled over.
The reason professional race car drivers don't drive like assholes on the freeway is they realize that not everyone is a professional race car driver.
True, but the reality is otherwise. To become really good at a video game means sitting in front of the video game. To become really good at athletics means actually going out and doing it. An athlete will not play video games in their rest period, because it is REST! I used to windsurf about 4 to 5 hours a day while still being in school. The last thing I wanted to do was play video games during my rest time. Video games are not resting, unless you are talking casual games, but I doubt casual gamers (like myself) have much better reactions that FPS gamers.
Ironically, even to this day when I want to rest and relax I exercise. Nothing too strenuous, just enough to keep the blood moving.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Wrong... Here is the issue. If you have a faster reaction time and play video games you tend to be more "jumpy". I don't mean this in a bad way. I mean you tend to be faster than other folks. THUS what ends up happening is that you drive faster, and the advantage you have in reaction gets nullified since you are driving faster. I am not saying you are a hazard. I am saying things balance out.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I usually place 1st in fast paced FPS games like Team Fortress 2, have won numerous local tournaments back in the day for Quake 3 too. From what I recall, many of the pro CS players used to include physical workouts in their training regime too. While I code and design games more than play these days, I still push hard to keep my 10km runs under 40 min. Recently I just so happened to get an achievement in Runkeeper for tracking my 1,000th km.
:)
We are out there
Someone teach this man (professor) the difference between causality and correlation.. He's not a artsie guy, he's a scientis... Wait... "assistant professor of psychiatry"..... Ok.. I understand.
I don't think you're seeing a gaming problem there. I've seen the same escaping-reality behavior with books and television. If your life isn't particularly rewarding or interesting, you'll seek it out somewhere else. You say he's seeking out a non-valuable sense of achievement, but has anyone ever provided him a particularly valuable one? The endemic problem you think you've identified might have more of a basis with our society as a whole than any particular symptom you've identified. Most people have pretty boring lives. Rather than complain about it, why not actually try to make your nephew's life more interesting?
When choosing your OS, you choose the best tool for the job. So who's worse, the guy who refuses to consider any other operating system, or the guy who installs the one that lets him use his computer for what he wants to do? If you want to play games and identify Linux and OSX as weak at gaming, it'd be kind of silly to install them. I like to run Linux in a work environment, but most places have windows-specific requirements for E-Mail and other applications. You can spend a lot of time trying to work around some of the limitations with wine, or you can just use Windows and install cygwin. Identifying the right tool for your particular job isn't a weakness. And demanding that everyone else use the tool you find to be best for your particular job isn't a strength.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But his unending focus on non-productive, non-valuable sense of achievement [unlocked!] had literally interfered with his development as a person.
For a second there, I thought you were talking about an insurance salesman. The simple truth is that most of our jobs are not useful. They amount to behaving like decapitated poultry, or as some sort of gatekeeper.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know I see the world differently.
After playing through the first Assassin's Creed game, I'd find myself looking up at tall buildings, churches, etc. working out the best path to take for climbing up to the roof.
Never actually attempted to climb to the roof of any building - probably for the best; I hate heights.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
Not everything we do in life is meant to have a direct and tangible benefit. Sometimes we just do shit for fun. Just because you feel that gaming is pointless doesn't mean that the rest of us feel that way too, nor does it mean you're right. I'm sure you waste your time on something that we don't see the point of doing.
With that in mind. You have to understand that some of us do get benefit out of gaming, even though you don't.
Since we've finally moved past the old "you only use 10% of your brain" canard, it seems plausible that the neural paths reinforced by/for tasks like this would otherwise have been doing something else. I wonder if there are tasks where these gamers perform significantly worse than non-gamers? If there are, are the deficits consistent, or do different brains lose different things?
Looks like the gamers know what the letter has been in some spot a few milli seconds later. It probably explains why gamers playing real baseball with real bats seem to be hitting where the ball had been a few milliseconds instead of where the ball is now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So this could just be attributed to lots of weed and caffeine?
Similar situation here. I've played computer games since Contra on the NES, and I have a girlfriend that doesn't need quote marks! :D
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This is me. I have an easier time reading the plays and movements of players in real life thanks to my video game days growing up. I don't really game anymore but I do spend almost as much time in the gym and playing sports now than I did playing games. My brain is still just as quick and now I'm in great shape and cut.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
What you say is very subjective. Your own point of view with your own experience. Then allow me to show you mine. After a long day of work, i like to relax a little bit before i get to my home chores. So i play a bit. One of my "basics of life" is "taking my mind off of the horrendous world outside" and i do that by blasting zombies. I will grant you that unlocking an achievement in a game is essentially meaningless in the grand scheme of things but it is by no mean useless.on a personal level. It gives a little extra good feeling. That helps relieve stress. Some times, for some people, that is all games are. Stress relievers that make your life a little better. a bit of distraction IS good for emotional balance. Sure people prone to addiction, people with nothing going for them, those that don't know anything else about the world (like say a teenager who's got little experience at that point in his life) can get hooked on that empty feeling of achievement. Shit happens. Some people fall between the cracks. That does not mean ALL GAMERS are hooked. You got as many different reasons to play games as you got gamers. As for the choice of OS... Do you think i have time and energy to fiddle with Wine and all that junk if i want to play for 30 minutes? No. I want it to work so i go with what works for me. Maturity problem? I am a soldier (a real one, i don't even like CoD et all) in a leadership position. People depend on me for guidance. I have a family. People depend on me PERIOD. Nobody in my care has ever gone cold or hungry. Where is that maturity problem you speak of?
Duke Nukem University?
Video games, especially first person shooters, definitely increase your situational awareness. In those games, you often have to identify multiple simultaneous threats, prioritize them, and strategize how to neutralize them all with split-second precision. While that process may require analyzing more of the visual field faster than the average person, as this study seems to show, I think there is a lot more higher-order processing going on to prioritize the threats and neutralize them.
With that said, I see a lot of comments that claim that video games aren't realistic enough for these skills to translate into real-world advantages and I have to highly disagree. Regardless of the realism of the weapons or the play mechanics, the increased situational awareness can be drastically advantageous in situations such as traffic accidents involving multiple vehicles, since a gamer would be able to analyze the new trajectories of all of the vehicles and have a better ability to steer around them. A non-gamer in that situation would not only be less likely to find a safe path through the colliding vehicles, but they would also be more likely to be overwhelmed by the situation and freeze or simply slam the brakes and hope for the best. The point is that regardless of the realism of the simulation, training your brain to handle multiple simultaneous moving threats will still provide an advantage over someone with no training.
I'm a gaming enthusiast, but I'm not going to prop up gaming on a pedestal as a particularly virtuous use of my time (though no less than the vast majority of hobbies).
Games are designed to reward players with hooks to provide constant entertainment triggers. Real life simply is not designed to reward you as frequently and consistently as games. Many of the real-world achievements that we respect involve long arduous stretches of little or no return for time invested.
The key lesson for young gamers is that they should learn to value internal achievement, i.e taking pride in the journey to mastery of a difficult subject without needing external validation. An important corollary to this is that life isn't just about being happy. If a person's goal is to chase your own happiness till the day you die, theycould just as easily accomplish this by drugging yourself out of this world. I'll go out on a limb here and say that what a person does with their life is more important than how "happy" they are while doing it. Besides, in time they may find that happiness sacrificed in the near-time results in much greater long-term satisfaction.
I'm pretty sure that professional athletes play video games. They have a lot of downtime.
I have a nephew who is a classic example of the video game addicted kid... only he's not a kid any more. Sure, he's got the boost in hand-eye coordination, but where does it benefit his life?
I have friend who is an alcoholic. That doesn't mean everyone who drinks wine is a loser.
An anecdote or single example is not a statistic, much less a trend.
How much better off would your nephew be if he didn't play games but merely watched Reality TV shows and Justin Bieber concerts?
There are many different ways to be a loser.
And there are many different skills in the world.
I'd rather have arthroscopic surgery done by a doc who is also a gamer than one who isn't and doesn't have the hand-eye coordination or the brain practice to understand what he sees on the screen.