Yes, Video Games Have a Health Benefit

Study: They improve visual perception, ability to multi-task

WEDNESDAY, May 28, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- You might lament the endless hours of video games your children play, but a new study suggests the obsession can lead to more than high scores and sore thumbs.

Playing action-rich video games like car racing and shoot-em-ups can improve visual perception and allow people to focus on many tasks at once. Such training helps them play the game at hand, but it might also give them an edge in real-world situations like driving a car in traffic, experts say.

"It's certainly wonderful to be able to focus on multiple things at once," says Catherine Harris, a psychologist at Boston University who has studied video games and perception. "The video game generation is going to be very resilient under distraction."

Video games might also be gender equalizers, Harris adds, helping girls trim certain perceptual edges boys now hold. "Typically, girls do have poorer use of spatial relations than boys do, but if girls could be encouraged to play more video games maybe that could change," she says.

In the latest study, Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester's Center for Visual Science and a colleague looked at the effects of action video game habits in a group of young adults. Players had logged at least four hours a week at their sets while non-players had little, and ideally no, experience with the games.

Not surprisingly, players performed better than non-players on tests of visual attention in fields directly engaged by the video games. They tracked 30 percent more items, and did so faster. They were also more adept at locating a specific object in a field of clutter.

But they also did better in areas beyond what the games "trained." They had less "attentional blink"-- a lag in perception that occurs when processing multiple tasks -- and were better able to switch tasks, according to the study to be published May 29 in Nature.

Of course, it's possible that video game players by nature have better visual abilities than other people. So the researchers had a group of non-players train on a war game for an hour a day. After 10 days, they outscored a group of people who'd played Tetris -- a rather simple but highly addictive shape game -- on three measures of visual attention.

Laurent Itti, a perception expert at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, says part of why people improve at playing video games or in doing other tasks that drench the senses is that they learn to sort out what's important and what's irrelevant.

"The naive observer will have his or her attention attracted to anything that's flashy. The trained observer will know that only a few [stimuli] are the ones to care about if you want to win at the game," he says.

However, he adds, the latest work and similar studies also show that "you develop a better ability of switching between objects and have a wider field you can monitor in a more efficient manner."

More information

For the low-down on the latest video games, try Video Game REVIEW. You can also check out this site on About.com for a short history of video games.

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