Could the playstation generation have a new heroine? While Lara Croft wins admirers for battling zombies and ancient mummies in Tomb Raider, an American scientist called Daphne Bavelier has shown that playing such video games may actually be good for you.
The new research shows that people who play action games including Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario Carts several times a week beat non-gamers in tests of visual ability.
It means that children hooked on computer games may not be rotting their brain, but rather improving attention skills such as being able to track and focus on objects while avoiding distractions. The study also suggests that hours hunched over a games console could improve elderly people's driving, or the concentration of airport security staff.
"Although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing," said Prof Bavelier of the University of Rochester
To test the effects of playing video games, Prof Bavelier and her research assistant, Shawn Green, asked both non-players and self-confessed male game addicts (they could only find one female player) to focus on, detect and count a series of shapes and letters flashed on to a computer screen. They found that the gamers reacted to the fast-moving objects more efficiently and could track up to five objects on the screen at a time - about 30% more than the other group.
The skills of the non-players could be improved by asking them to train on a game for an hour a day, over a period of 10 days. But the type of game was critical. While non-players who shot baddies in the war game Medal of Honor significantly bettered their performance in the visual attention tests, those who merely rotated blocks in the game Tetris showed no improvement.
"By forcing players to simultaneously juggle a number of varied tasks ... action video game-playing pushes the limits of three rather different aspects of visual attention," the researchers said. Their results are published today in the science journal Nature.
Jeremy Wolfe of the visual attention lab at Harvard University says the findings can be applied to real-life situations. Accident-prone elderly drivers are more likely to score badly in field-of-view tests, for example. "It would be a great leap at this point to say that Grandma should be playing first-person shooter games so she would be a safer driver, but those are the things one might investigate," Prof Wolfe said. "And people at airport security screens are doing visual attention tasks."
But the results are not an excuse for teenagers across the land to ditch homework for game playing. "Just having great attentional ability will not get you through life," warned Mr Wolfe.
