People who regularly play video games tend to "see more" in a visual field and have better decision-making abilities than people who don't play these games, a new study from Duke University has found.
"Gamers see the world differently. They are able to extract more information from a visual scene," said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine.
The study included 125 participants who were either non-gamers or very intensive gamers. Each of the participants was given a visual memory task, in which the participant was shown a circular arrangement of 8 letters for about a tenth of a second. An arrow would appear on the screen at a delay range of 13 milliseconds to 2.5 that pointed to one spot on the circle where a letter had previously appeared. The participants' task was to identify the letter in that spot.
Researchers found that people who played games outperformed non-players every single time.
Previous work has shown that gamers tend to process a vast amount of visual data in relatively less time. A gamer makes "probabilistic inferences" where he/she needs to make decisions about visual signals. "They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster," Appelbaum said in a news release.
Participants in both the groups discarded unwanted information at the same rate, but researchers found that gamers had stored a large amount of information at the beginning of the task.
Researchers reasoned that there could be three possible reasons that were associated with the gamers' performance in the visual memory task: they were seeing better, storing more information or had improved decision-making skills.
Applebaum said that it is more likely that gamers had developed the ability to better scan the visual field and that they had better decision-making skills.
The study is published in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics.
Another related study had found that video games slow memory decline in older adults.