The hours we dedicate to video games are not as fruitless as we usually think. Researchers at Duke University (USA) have shown that “gamers” see the world in a different way, to the extent that they are able to extract more information from a visual scene than most of us .
To prove this, Greg Appelbaum and his colleagues subjected a series of subjects to visual memory tests in which, for just a tenth of a second, a set of 8 letters arranged in a circular way appeared on a screen. A few moments later, an arrow was displayed pointing to one of the points where a letter had previously been. And the participants had to find out which letter had been there before. In all cases, those who spent time each day playing video games obtained better results when it comes to remembering the letters that we never played, according to the authors of the work in the magazine Attention, Perception and Psychophysics .
The researchers assessed three possible explanations for this superiority in answering correctly. One was that their visual memory lasted longer, something they discarded in the course of the experiments. The other two options are that video game users see better or that they are trained to make better decisions based on the information available. To elucidate which explanation is more plausible, they have already announced that they will use images obtained by magnetic resonance imaging to thoroughly analyze the brains of video game fans.
Previous studies had shown that video game fans are faster responding to visual stimuli and able to keep track of more elements than those who do not spend time with video games.
