Practice not only makes perfect, it may improve gamers' ability to learn.
Press Release:
"When we study perceptual learning we usually exclude people who have
tons of video game playing time because they seem to have different
visual processing. They are quicker and more accurate."
A small study
from Brown University suggests video gamers, who are already known to
have a better visual-processing skills, may also be able to improve on
those attributes faster than the average person.
According to Brown University press, the study analyzed nine gamers
and compared them with nine non-gamers during a two-day trial.
Researchers required participants to complete two visual tasks, one
right after the other. The next day they repeated the exercises (in a
random order) and compared how participants improved.
What they found is that the second task interfered with the ability
of non-gamers to improve on the first — while gamers improved equally
well on both exercises.
“We sometimes see that an expert athlete can learn movements very
quickly and accurately and a musician can play the piano at the very
first sight of the notes very elegantly … maybe [gamers] can learn more
efficiently and quickly as a result of training,” senior author Yuka
Sasaki said.
The authors admit the findings require more study, conceding that
there is no proof that video games caused the learning improvement,
since people with quick visual-processing skills could be naturally
drawn to gaming.
The researchers wrote:
"It may be possible that the vast amount of visual training frequent
gamers receive over the years could help contribute to honing
consolidation mechanisms in the brain, especially for visually developed
skills."
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