Monday, July 1, 2013

Video gamers capture more information faster for visual decision-making

Hours spent at the video gaming console probably train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers.

“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.”

Earlier research by others has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially one of the “first-person shooters,” a gamer makes “probabilistic inferences” about what he/she is seeing — good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right — as rapidly as he/she can.


This study was supported by grants from the Army Research Office, the Department of Homeland Security, DARPA, and Nike Inc.

No comments:

Post a Comment