Video Gamers Make Faster Decisions That Are Just As Accurate – Study

Did you know that playing video games makes you more awesome? Of course you did.

A bunch of old people in coats from the University of Rochester have discovered that video gamers develop a heightened sense of sensitivity (not the chick-flick type of sensitivity) and benefit from a wide variety of improved skills that assist in daily life.

These clever folks will be publishing the study in a journal called Current Biology, so if you are still in school and need to convince your parents to let you tea-bag n00bs in Halo more often, then you had better add it to your Christmas wish list.

Find out more about how they did it, after the jump.

Let’s just get one thing straight though, all of the benefits were developed by people playing action video games, so if you spend all day playing FarmVille, don’t expect to have any cool super powers like the rest of us.

An article on ScienceDaily.com tells of how the researchers firstly did the impossible, which involved finding a dozens of 18 – 25 year olds that didn’t already play games. After that they got a whole bunch of them to play 50 hours of hardcore action games like Call of Duty and Unreal Tournament while another bunch played the not-so-hardcore torture simulator, The Sims 2.

They then ran them through a whole bunch of test and would you believe it, the hardcore gamers came out on top, with the article saying:

The action game players were up to 25 percent 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 trigger-happy 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 you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference.”

It’s all really interesting stuff, and if you want to know more about it, hit up the full article through the source link below.

Source: ScienceDaily

Last Updated: September 14, 2010