Quick, what just flashed across the bottom left of your screen?
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)Ladies and gentlemen, may I now present your deep thought of the day: People who play video games are better at playing video games than people who don't play video games.
OK, new findings out of Duke may be a bit more complex than that, but there's not much of a spoiler alert to this one. Hours spent at a gaming console seem to translate directly to a test, taken at a computer, of how the brain tracks visual stimuli, according to a new study at the Duke School of Medicine.
Researchers found 125 participants within a larger visual cognition study who were either "nongamers" (apparently this cohort was in short supply) or "very intensive gamers" (apparently this one was readily available). Each participant had to perform a visual sensory memory task that involved watching a circular arrangement of eight letters flash across a screen for a tenth of a second and being asked after as few as 13 milliseconds and as many as 2.5 seconds to name the letter that appeared in a spot an arrow is pointing to.
Though all players performed worse as time passed, the researchers report in the June issue of the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics that ... [Read more]
Related Links:
Xbox next: What to expect at Tuesday's Xbox reveal event
Sony still has a lot to prove at E3 2013
Sony CEO on PlayStation 4: Gamers come first
Xbox One moves Microsoft closer to living room hub
Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4
     |