Score! Video gamers may learn visual tasks more quickly

Many studies show that video gamers perform better than non-gamers on certain visual tasks, like managing distractors and identifying targets, but a small new Brown University study provides gamers with some cognitive bonus points. The study results suggest that gaming not only improves their visual skill but also may improve their learning ability for those skills.

If the association the researchers document in the journal PLoS ONE indeed proves to be causal, then the implication would be that practice not only improves performance but also augments the capacity to improve performance further.

"When we study perceptual learning we usually exclude people who have tons of video game playing time because they seem to have different visual processing. They are quicker and more accurate," said senior author Yuka Sasaki, associate professor (research) of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown. "But they may be in an expert category of visual processing. We sometimes see that an expert athlete can learn movements very quickly and accurately and a musician can play the piano at the very first sight of the notes very elegantly, so maybe the learning process is also different. Maybe they can learn more efficiently and quickly as a result of training."

After all, video gaming has become a significant part of popular culture, making the study of gaming performance and its effects on perception and learning more important, said Aaron Berard, lead author and graduate student.

"In the last 20 years, video game playing as an activity has gone from simple entertainment to a serious hobby," he said. "Video games are even played as a sport in some organizations today. It is important to recognize that more and more people are engaging in video games in modern society on a regular basis, which lends credit to why we should study gaming's effects on the brain."

Game on

To conduct the study, the researchers pitted nine frequent gamers against a control group of nine people who game rarely if ever. They participated in a two-day trial of visual task learning. Subjects were shown an on-screen "texture" of either visual or horizontal lines and had to quickly point out - in a fraction of a second - the one area where an anomalous texture appeared. In visual processing research this is a standard protocol called a "texture discrimination task."

Prior studies have shown that most people can be trained to improve their performance on such tasks, but only if they are given enough time for the learning to "consolidate" in their mind, presumably as neural circuits embodying the learning take shape. If they move on to a second task too quickly, for example, that could interfere with their learning of the first one.

Sasaki, Berard, and their co-authors wanted to find out if gamers were better able to overcome this interference, compared to non-gamers. They therefore trained the subjects on a second similar task soon after training them on the first. If in the first task the main texture was horizontal, for example, the second time it was vertical, or vice versa.