Study: Shooters Good for Your Brain

Games may not bad for you after all, according to a joint study conducted by the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. More precisely, first-person shooters are better at training you for the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and less effective at making you a killing machine.

"DOOM'd to switch: superior cognitive flexibility in players of first person shooter games," a research paper published on Frontiers in Cognition (available here in PDF format) reveals results that run contrary to most of the research we've read about video games here in the United States. You know, studies that say, for example, that first-person shooters train people to be killers..

While the study focuses on the benefits of playing first-person shooters, there's an interesting fact that most anti-video game advocates probably don't want to read: first-person shooters don't do a very good job at training players in the art of accuracy. More on that later.

Thirty-four adults (17 video game players and 17 non-gamers) participated in the study, with video game players defined as those who have played "video games at least four times a week for a minimum period of 6 months." All of the video game players had some experience with games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield, and Grand Theft Auto IV. Non-gamers were described as having "little to no video game experience." All of the participants were recruited among "student populations and through advertisements on internet forums" catering to video game players.

While details of the study are pretty complex, the short story is that the video game players were able to rapidly react to fast moving visual and auditory stimuli, and to switch back and forth between different subtasks faster than the non-video game playing group. The study also conducted test to make sure that these results weren't based on age or I.Q. After eliminating those possibilities, researchers found that it had more to do with first-person shooter games than any other possible factors.

As for accuracy, the study found no discernable difference between the two groups:

"...VGPs [video game players], who are often accused of being antisocial or aggressive in the media, might have been more intrinsically motivated than NVGPs [non video game players] to accomplish the task. However, the data do[es] not provide strong support for this possibility: even though VGPs were somewhat (but not significantly) faster than NVGPs, they tended to be somewhat (but not significantly) less accurate, suggesting that the overall performance in the two groups was rather comparable."

Source: The Sun