Playing action video games boosts learning

Playing action video games may help people improve their learning capabilities, a study said Monday.

Some studies demonstrated that individuals who play fast-paced, action-packed video games display improved performance in perception, attention, and cognition. However, the mechanisms that underlie such improvements are largely unknown.

Daphne Bavelier, a research professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, and colleagues conducted a series of behavioral experiments on groups of 10 to 14 individuals to determine the nature of the mechanisms.

The researchers observed that individuals with experience playing action video games performed better at pattern discrimination tasks than players without action video game experience.

The key to the action-gamers' success, the researchers found, was that they employ superior perceptual templates, the brain's models for the outside world that are built from perceptual experiences.

"In order to sharpen its prediction skills, our brains constantly build models, or 'templates,' of the world," Bavelier explained. "The better the template, the better the performance. And now we know playing action video game actually fosters better templates."

Then, the team conducted another experiment to determine if habitual players of fast-paced, action-rich video games may be endowed with better templates independently of their game play, or if the action game play leads them to have better templates.

Individuals with little video game experience were recruited, and as part of the experiment, they were asked to play video games for 50 hours over the course of nine weeks. One group played action video games, while a second group played 50 hours of non- action video games.

The trainees were tested on a pattern discrimination task before and after the video game "training." The test showed that the action video games players improved their templates, compared to the control group who played the non-action video games.

"When they began the perceptual learning task, action video gamers were indistinguishable from non-action gamers," said Bavelier. "They developed better templates for the task, much, much faster showing an accelerated learning curve."

The researchers also found that the action gamers' improved performance is a lasting effect. When tested several months to a year later, the action-trained participants still outperformed the other participants, suggesting that they retained their ability to build better templates.

The findings were published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.