Git You Sucka!
By Richard Ingham
Agence France-Presse
PARIS
Video games, say detractors, are prone to turn young adults into socially dysfunctional geeks or angry misfits.
But a pair of brain scientists have leapt to the defense of Lara Croft, Spider-Man, the Matrix, and Zombie Revenge saying they have found some video games give a remarkable boost to visual skills.
Cognitive experts Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester in New York state, set up a series of experiments to compare the responses of nongamers with those who play several times a week and have at least six months experience under their belt.
In the first test, there were six circles that were either empty or had a symbol inside. The volunteers, most of them male and all aged between 18 and 23, had to match the symbol with a larger one, to the side of the screen.
Veteran gamers were spectacularly faster than their nongaming counterparts, especially when the test became harder and the circles filled up with odd symbols.
Another experiment dwelt on a bottleneck in visual processing called the "attentional blink"-identifying a target that appears very quickly (between two-tenths and half a second) after a first one. Again, the gamers performed brilliantly, identifying the second target almost twice as quickly and accurately as their nonplaying counterparts.
"Video game playing enhances the capacity of visual attention and its spatial distribution," Green and Bavelier write in Nature. "Clearly, these individuals have an increased ability to process information over time."
Why, though, is unclear.
It could be that gamers are able to process a single target more quickly, or their minds can easily juggle several "attention windows" at the same time, the scientists suggest.
The pair wanted to make sure the games-rather than any innate qualities in the gamers they selected-were responsible for these enhanced talents. And they were curious to find out which kind of game could boost specific skills.
So they set up two groups of nonplayers and trained them on one of two games, for an hour per day for 10 consecutive days.
One was an action video game, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, in which the player takes the role of a World War II soldier. The other was the popular game Tetris, in which a shaped block floats down from the top of the screen and has to be slotted into the right place with others at the bottom.
After their training, the guinea pigs were put back on the original experiments. Those who had been playing Medal of Honor showed a big improvement, whereas the Tetris volunteers showed an almost negligible change.
"By forcing players to simultaneously juggle a number of varied tasks (detect new enemies, track existing enemies, and avoid getting hurt, among others), action video game playing pushes the limits of three rather different aspects of visual attention," the study says.
"Although video game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing."
Video games have been around for more than three decades, but in recent years they have been attacked for their glorification of violence and painless depiction of death and, in racing games, encouragement of reckless driving.
There was especial handwringing after the Columbine massacre in Colorado in 1999, when it was found that the two American teens who carried out the multiple slaying were fanatical players of a shoot-'em-up game called Doom.
A study published in April 2000 by the US Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that realistic graphics and extreme violence in video games clearly contributed to bouts of aggressive behavior and long-term delinquency.
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