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Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility
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."
is in my opinion better and open source as well. http://wz2100.net/ - Graphics are a little dated but the gameplay is very addictive. I would say if the girls were tested with this game they would have been playing for longer than an hour per day ;)
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.
...or that will undo all the cognitive gains you get from playing.
Possibly... but they are also neuroscience and psychology PhDs at UT Austin.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
It turns out that playing video games on a regular basis trains you to be better at the skills those games demand.
It also turns out that some video games train valuable skills while still being fun, and other video games train you to be a vegetable.
News at 11.