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The benefits of video games

By dmunger on July 11, 2006.

We've written before about the positive impact of video games, on how playing video games can improve visual ability for certain tasks such as field of view and attentional blink. Now the researchers who conducted the initial study have completed some follow-up research. Chris Chatham has the details:

The authors note that their results do not show a connection between subitizing and multiple-object tracking abilities, which had been hypothesized in the literature previously. Instead, multiple object tracking appears to increase with serial enumeration ability. According to my interpretation of this fact, it seems that the most parsimonious explanation of the data is that video game players have an increased "cycle speed," which conveys benefits both to serial counting processes as well as to serial working memory "refresh" processes.

So instead of processing visual information more efficiently, it appears that gamers are simply processing it faster. Fascinating stuff.

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