Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility

Posted by Unknown on from the tricked-into-learning dept.

First time accepted submitter briglass writes "Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids. The control group played The Sims. It's been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility."

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Even better by djupedal · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...start making apps. An hour or more a day for a year. Tacks will start saying they are as sharp as you.

  2. Doing anything cognitively challenging would... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Games have nothing to do with it. It seems rather self-evident that doing that involves learning something reasonably challenging for an hour a day for two months would boost cognitive flexibility.

  3. Re:cognitive skills increased by phantomfive · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Unless you move to Korea. Then you get hot girls like this brother. Or maybe this

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. Fast-paced chess on steroids by Russ1642 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I doubt anyone who makes such a claim has ever seen high level fast-paced chess.