Role Of Video Games In Improving Cognitive Skills(part 1)

Very often we hear about various studies stating the positive effect of video games over various cognitive skills .Whether this is just a part of the marketing strategy of the companies trying to sell their products or any of this is really true.
Today i thought of finding out various studies making such claims and how far these are effective.


The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games
C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier
Link:http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/Daphne/TCN_of_VGP.pdf

"The Entertainment Software Association estimates that around 60% of
Americans, around 145 million people in all, currently play some type of
video game and despite the common view of video games being “for kids,” the
average age of a video game player is actually around 29 years old"


"While the majority of research (and media attention) has
focused on the potential for video game play to negatively affect temperament and social
behavior, or on the potential to harness video games to help children learn, a subset of
cognitive scientists have investigated the effect of video games on the more fundamental
question of how people see the world."


"Therefore our question is simply, given an environment in which
events happen faster, objects move more quickly, peripheral processing is placed at a
premium, and the number of items that need to be kept track of far exceeds the
circumstances experienced in normal life, is it possible to extend the normal processing
power of the human nervous system?"

"However,
there are several well-defined subsets of the population that could reap great benefit from
such research. Of these, two in particular have been studied most extensively, these
being: 1) populations that have experienced a deficit in perceptual processing and require
a “boost” to recover normal vision (such as stroke victims or the elderly) and 2)
populations that require “better than normal” perceptual capabilities (such as military
personnel)."


"In this
context, it is actually quite surprising that playing a video game could affect such
widespread aspects of vision and cognition as peripheral localization or the capacity of
visual attention, let alone general cognitive ability (Drew and Waters 1986)."


"Dorval and Pepin measured the ability to determine the three-dimensional
structure of an object presented in two-dimensions and how the same object would
appear if rotated in space (using the Space Relations Test of the Differential Aptitude
Tests). They asked if scores on this test could be improved by training on the video game
Zaxxon (Dorval and Pepin 1986).
In Zaxxon, the player controls a spaceship in
simulated three-dimensional space (Zaxxon was actually one of the few games at the time
that simulated three-dimensionality) and attempts to shoot enemies and to avoid
obstacles, while avoiding being shot by enemies. Subjects in the experimental group
underwent 8 sessions of Zaxxon play, while a matched control group received no video
game experience. Following training, the video game trained group showed significantly
higher spatial skill scores than the control group indicating that spatial visualization is
trainable with video game play. A study by Gagnon also reported comparable
enhancements in measures of spatial skills in video game trainees (Gagnon 1985)."
"Another common measurement of visuo-motor skill is the simple reaction time.
Orosy-Fildes and Allan (Orosy-Fildes and Allan 1989) performed a study in which 20
subjects were given a reaction time pretest (press a button when a light turns on). After
the pretest, half of the subjects underwent a 15-minute practice treatment on an Atari
2600 video game system. All of the subjects were then post-tested on the reaction time
test. Those that received the video game experience showed a reduction in reaction time
of approximately 50 milliseconds not observed in the control group that received no
game experience. Such a dramatic change after only 15 minutes of training is truly
remarkable."


"In a similar vein, McClurg and Chaille demonstrated that children trained on
video games demonstrated improved scores on The Mental Rotations test (McClurg and
Chaille 1987) and that younger children (5th graders) given video game experience
performed better than older children (9th graders) without this experience. Thus, this
seems to be a case wherein video game experience can trump the limits imposed by
nature."


"At a very simple level,
visual attention can be thought of as a “gate” to perception. There is far more visual
information available to us than we are capable of processing, and thus visual attention is
the mechanism through which some items are selected for further processing while others
are left unnoticed. For instance, although you are currently reading this book chapter,
there are other things you can “see.” Perhaps a desk, a coffee cup, a chair, etc? Although
they have physically been present the entire time, it is likely that while reading you don’t
really “notice” them. In this case the book chapter would be said to be the focus of visual
attention and thus the other peripheral items were less or unattended."


"Thus one could argue that what really matters for human vision is not necessarily what a
person can “see,” but to what they can attend."

(contd in next post)