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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?
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.
I drive at full throttle at all times, lane splitting on the median and using only the handbrake for those times I need to round sharp corners. I run over hundreds of pedestrians, most of whom get right back up and simply curse at me. When the cops come, I drive outside their search radius and they call it off.
Vidya games have taught me well.
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.
They should make it so the first post cannot be anonymous.
It should come with a first post pre attached.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on this.
You're missing a much more fundamental possible cause of the behavior. By and large, the drivers of rice rockets are late teens/early 20s males. Late teens/early 20s males have a couple things going on:
A) They engage in experience seeking, risk taking behaviors at a much, MUCH higher rate. The causal link between that and testosterone is the popular theory, scientifically it's still up in the air as far as I know, but I haven't really been paying attention.
B) They exhibit poor judgement. This isn't terribly surprising, given that judgement tends to grow out of experience, and they just don't have that much of it.
In short, late teens/early 20s males, myself included, have been driving like assholes for longer than the video games you want to blame it on have been around. I haven't really spent much time talking to any of them about it, so it's possible that's how they're justifying their stupid driving practices these days, but it's not what's causing it. Me, I just claimed to have superior situational awareness and car control, I didn't even bother trying to justify that accidents are caused by people who failed to come up to my mark...I didn't care about them.
Thankfully, as I look back, I don't think I caused any accidents, but that's really through no credit to myself.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
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
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Before video games, the idiots in the rice rockets were idiots in muscle cars. And before muscle cars the idiots were in hot rods. Before that, you had people who would whip their horses into a froth and pull their surrey too fast. (They even optionally had fringe on the top; compare and contrast "dingle balls")
Video games can improve driving skills. Gran Turismo did for me. It made me a smoother driver even around the speed limits.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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