Tuesday, January 29, 2008
See, playing games isn't just a waste of time
I've always thought that gaming was something that enhanced my ability to ride DH faster, being able to spot and run cleaner faster lines. Of course, I couldn't really prove that, I just suspected that gaming was something that helped develop a certain skill-set when it came to quick line detection from an otherwise random array of rocks. Turns out I was right, as recent research has shown gamers can consistently outperform non-gamers with regard to several areas of cognitive processes.
So... I'm not wasting my time, I'm exercising my gray matter. ;)
Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York have been looking at exactly how continued videogame-use influences our visual processing. The Rochester researchers intended to see whether habitual game-playing improved the visual skills of gamers, and they came up with a number of tests to measure this against nongamers. They reported that “videogame players were found to outperform non-videogame players on the localisation of an eccentric target among distractors, on the number of visual items they could apprehend at once, and on the fast temporal processing of visual information.” Or, in common-speak: gamers are better at using their eyes, and better at understanding what they see and doing something about it, than non-gamers.
PermaLink / Posted by: Tony
