A study led by
University of Toronto psychology researchers has found that people who play
action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed seem to learn a new
sensorimotor skill more quickly than non-gamers do. A new sensorimotor skill,
such as learning to ride a bike or typing, often requires a new pattern of
coordination between vision and motor movement. With such skills, an individual
generally moves from novice performance, characterized by a low degree of
coordination, to expert performance, marked by a high degree of coordination.
As a result of successful sensorimotor learning, one comes to perform these
tasks efficiently and perhaps even without consciously thinking about them. To
find out, they set up two experiments. In the first, 18 gamers (those who
played a first-person shooter game at least three times per week for at least
two hours each time in the previous six months) and 18 non-gamers (who had
little or no video game use in the past two years) performed a manual tracking
task. Using a computer mouse, they were instructed to keep a small green square
cursor at the centre of a white square moving target which moved in a very
complicated pattern that repeated itself. The task probes sensorimotor control,
because participants see the target movement and try to coordinate their hand
movements with what they see.
In the early
stages of doing the tasks, the gamers' performance was not significantly better
than non-gamers. This suggests that while chronically playing action video
games requires constant motor control, playing these games does not give gamers
a reliable initial advantage in new and unfamiliar sensorimotor tasks. By the
end of the experiment, all participants performed better as they learned the
complex pattern of the target. The gamers, however, were significantly more
accurate in following the repetitive motion than the non-gamers. This is likely
due to the gamers' superior ability in learning a novel sensorimotor pattern,
that is, their gaming experience enabled them to learn better than the
non-gamers. In the next experiment, the researchers wanted to test whether the
superior performance of the gamers was indeed a result of learning rather than
simply having better sensorimotor control. To eliminate the learning component
of the experiment, they required participants to again track a moving dot, but
in this case the patterns of motion changed throughout the experiment. The
result this time: neither the gamers nor the non-gamers improved as time went
by, confirming that learning was playing a key role and the gamers were
learning better. One of the benefits of playing action games may be an enhanced
ability to precisely learn the dynamics of new sensorimotor tasks.
More
information: