14 DAY TRIAL // Some say playing video games is a complete waste of time. As it turns out, this is not actually the case: all those hours that gamers spend with the video gaming console help them literally see the world differently than ordinary folks do.
A team of Duke University researchers writing in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics has recently found that gamers see better than others do, meaning that they can collect and process visual input more efficiently.
The scientists suspect that, while playing video games, people also train their brains to make head and tail of whatever visual comes their way both faster and with a higher degree of accuracy.
Professor Greg Appelbaum, currently working with the Duke School of Medicine, summed up his and his colleagues’ findings as follows:
“Gamers see the world differently. They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”
As detailed on the official website for the Duke University, the researchers concluded that gamers have better visual abilities after carrying out a series of experiments with the help of 125 volunteers.
Some of these volunteers almost never played video games, while others admitted to playing for hours on end on a fairly regular basis.
The volunteers were asked to perform several tasks that allowed the researchers to test their response to visual stimuli.
The gamers outperformed the non-gamers on all occasions, and did not even have to focus all that much in order to do so.
All the volunteers forgot what they had seen in a relatively short time span. However, the researchers say that, as far as they can tell, the gamers were the ones who collected more information in the first place.
This research is not the first to show that gamers see better than other people.
Thus, several other studies have shown that video gaming enthusiasts can keep tabs on more items and respond faster to visual stimuli.