14 DAY TRIAL // According to a team of researchers working with the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, kids who play video games on a daily basis are likely to experience an improvement in their ability to carry out various cognitive tasks.
More precisely, it is being said that playing a given video game for one hour per day encourages individuals to develop very specific cognitive skills.
Interestingly enough, the researchers who have taken the time to look into how video games affect people's thought processes argue that each and every video game acts on the human psyche in a different manner.
Thus, a gamer is likely to develop a certain cognitive skill whose underlying principles are very much intertwined with what he is required to do when playing. NDTV Gadgets informs us that, as part of their research into how video games impact on people's cognitive skills, the scientists asked five volunteers to play a game on their smartphones for one hour per day, five times a week.
The volunteers were asked to carry on with this gaming schedule for one complete month, and each of them was given a different game to play.
Later on, the people who took part in these experiments had their cognitive skills tested by the researchers.
It was revealed that those who had spent their time playing action games found it easier to keep tabs on several different objects at the same time, whereas those who were asked to either find hidden objects, or match different items found it easier to rely on visual cues in order to perform various tasks.
“We conclude that training specific cognitive abilities frequently in a video game improves performance in tasks that share common underlying demands,” the researchers write in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
“Overall, these results suggest that many video game-related cognitive improvements may not be due to training of general broad cognitive systems such as executive attentional control, but instead due to frequent utilization of specific cognitive processes during game play,” they go on to argue.