The goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that gaming is associated with a general and generalizable enhancement of cognitive flexibility. The new generation of “First Person Shooter” (FPS) games (compared to older generation games) are not just about pressing one button at the right moment, but require the players to develop a flexible mindset that allows them to engage in complex scenarios, to rapidly react to moving visual and sudden acoustic events, and to switch back and forth between different subtasks. Importantly, attention was also affected in NVGPs that were trained for several months on action videogames, confirming the causal role of gaming experience. The results showed that VGPs performed better than NVGPs across the whole field of view. A flanker compatibility task was used to measure an increase in attentional capacity and an adapted “useful field of view” task assessed the critical areas of the visual field. ) demonstrated that videogame experience modulates different aspects of visual selective attention. VGPs also showed better performance in both easy and difficult visual search tasks ( Castel et al., 2005 (2005)įound VGPs to outperform NVGPs in visually tracking multiple moving objects across a display crowded with distracters.
Recent studies on the differences in cognitive skills between video-game players (VGPs) and non-video-game players (NVGPs) have shown surprising and theoretically interesting effects on various perceptual tasks. Compared to the amount of attention these possible negative effects receive, very little research has been done on possible positive effects that videogame experience might have on cognitive skills and abilities.
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