DECISIONMAKING BOOSTED BY VIDEOGAMESIt might be worth equipping decisionmakers at the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks with video games. Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester in New York State have discovered that playing action video games trains people to make correct decisions faster. They found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this benefit doesn’t just make them better at video games, but improves a wide variety of skills that can help with everyday activities like multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd and navigating around town.In a study published in the journal Current Biology, authors Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and Shawn Green report that video games could provide a potent training regimen for many types of real-life situations.Video games have grown in popularity to the point where 68% of US households and uncounted numbers of Israeli children and adults play them.The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players and split them into two groups. One played 50 hours of the fastpaced action video games Call of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament, while the other group played 50 hours of the slow-moving strategy game The Sims 2. After this training period, all the subjects were asked to make quick decisions in several tasks designed by the researchers. The participants had to look at a screen, analyze what was going on and answer a simple question about the action as quickly as possible (such as whether a clump of erratically moving dots was migrating right or left on average). To ensure that the effect wasn’t limited to just visual perception, participants were also asked to complete an analogous task that was purely auditory.The action game players were up to 25% faster at coming to a conclusion, and answered just as many questions correctly as their strategy-game playing peers.“It’s not the case that the action-game players are triggerhappy and less accurate: They are just as accurate and also faster,” Bavelier said. “Action-game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or are in a battlefield, that can make all the difference.”The authors’ neural simulations shed light on why action gamers have augmented decision-making capabilities. People make decisions based on probabilities that they are constantly calculating and refining, Bavelier explains. The process is called probabilistic inference. The brain continuously accumulates small pieces of visual or auditory information as a person surveys a scene, eventually gathering enough for the person to make what they perceive to be an accurate decision. “Decisions are never black and white,” she said. “The brain is always computing probabilities. As you drive, for instance, you may see a movement on your right, estimate whether you are on a collision course and, based on that probability, make a binary decision – brake or don’t brake.”Action-video game players’ brains are more efficient collectors of visual and auditory information, and therefore arrive at the necessary threshold of information much faster than non gamers, the researchers found.The new study builds on previous work by Bavelier and colleagues that showed video games improve vision by making players more sensitive to slightly different shades of color.
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DECISIONMAKING BOOSTED BY VIDEOGAMESIt might be worth equipping decisionmakers at the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks with video games. Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester in New York State have discovered that playing action video games trains people to make correct decisions faster. They found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this benefit doesn’t just make them better at video games, but improves a wide variety of skills that can help with everyday activities like multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd and navigating around town.In a study published in the journal Current Biology, authors Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and Shawn Green report that video games could provide a potent training regimen for many types of real-life situations.Video games have grown in popularity to the point where 68% of US households and uncounted numbers of Israeli children and adults play them.The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players and split them into two groups. One played 50 hours of the fastpaced action video games Call of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament, while the other group played 50 hours of the slow-moving strategy game The Sims 2. After this training period, all the subjects were asked to make quick decisions in several tasks designed by the researchers. The participants had to look at a screen, analyze what was going on and answer a simple question about the action as quickly as possible (such as whether a clump of erratically moving dots was migrating right or left on average). To ensure that the effect wasn’t limited to just visual perception, participants were also asked to complete an analogous task that was purely auditory.The action game players were up to 25% faster at coming to a conclusion, and answered just as many questions correctly as their strategy-game playing peers.“It’s not the case that the action-game players are triggerhappy and less accurate: They are just as accurate and also faster,” Bavelier said. “Action-game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or are in a battlefield, that can make all the difference.”The authors’ neural simulations shed light on why action gamers have augmented decision-making capabilities. People make decisions based on probabilities that they are constantly calculating and refining, Bavelier explains. The process is called probabilistic inference. The brain continuously accumulates small pieces of visual or auditory information as a person surveys a scene, eventually gathering enough for the person to make what they perceive to be an accurate decision. “Decisions are never black and white,” she said. “The brain is always computing probabilities. As you drive, for instance, you may see a movement on your right, estimate whether you are on a collision course and, based on that probability, make a binary decision – brake or don’t brake.”Action-video game players’ brains are more efficient collectors of visual and auditory information, and therefore arrive at the necessary threshold of information much faster than non gamers, the researchers found.The new study builds on previous work by Bavelier and colleagues that showed video games improve vision by making players more sensitive to slightly different shades of color.