If you need another excuse to spend the evening on the couch playing Halo: Reach, scientists from the University of Rochester can make you a good case. Research shows that people who play fast-paced action video games are better at making split-second decisions.
The study, published Sept. 14 in Current Biology, divided 25 undergraduate and graduate students, who weren’t regular video game players, into two groups. One group spent 50 hours over the next several weeks playing action-packed Call of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004. The other group played The Sims 2, a life-simulator.
At the end of the gaming period, the researchers tested the reaction skills of the newly initiated gamers by giving the subjects less than a second to decide whether dots were moving across a screen mostly to the left or the right.
The action game players’ responses were significantly more accurate. Study author C. Shawn Green, now a post-doctoral associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, attributes their accuracy to an improvement in something called “probabilistic inference.”
Whether or not you’re familiar with the term, you’re making probabilistic inferences constantly. For example, while driving at night, you must decide almost instantaneously how to respond to an obscure, dark shape. In the milliseconds spent deciding whether or not to brake, your brain furiously computes the likelihood that the shape you’ve seen is a harmless mailbox or a panicked deer about to attack your car.
How the brain sifts through the massive amount of visual information taken in by our eyes is what Brian Levinthal and his fellow researchers study at Northwestern University’s Visual Attention and Cognition Lab. Levinthal, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology, says the brain learns to pay more attention to important things, like the dark shape by the road, rather than details like the stars in the sky.
Action game players may be faster at gathering the information required to make probabilistic inferences, says Green. From the quick glance at the dark shape on the road, a gamer might make the decision to slam on the brakes a few moments faster than a non-gamer, possibly saving a car and a deer in the process. But Levinthal says it isn’t clear why gamers are faster.
“Something that needs a lot more research is to determine whether these people are better at extracting the information quickly, or is it that they spend less time focusing on unimportant details?” says Levinthal.
The study’s results don’t surprise avid Call of Duty player Brendan Scanell, a Weinberg sophomore. He says that after playing the game for awhile, “you stop thinking and you just start reacting by instinct.”
Other studies have shown that playing video games may improve eyesight or make surgeons less error-prone. But Levinthal warns against extrapolating too much from research like this.
“I wouldn’t recommend dropping out of school and playing video games to make your brain smarter,” Levinthal says. “It’s not clear whether you need to play the game to get that improvement. Maybe there are other ways that might be more effective.””