6.12.2013
Gamers: Better Visual Memories
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People who play a lot of video games have better visual memories than those who don't, a new study says.
"Gamers see the world differently," Duke University psychiatry professor Greg Appelbaum said. "They are able to extract more information from a visual scene."
Duke University researchers recruited 125 volunteers who were either non-gamers or intensive gamers.
Each was shown a flash of a circular arrangement of eight letters for one-tenth of a second.
Between 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds later, an arrow would appear on the screen pointing to a spot where a letter had been.
The participants then had to remember which letter was there.
The gamers beat the non-gamers at every time interval.
Appelbaum said that's because when someone plays a game, especially a shooter, they make "probabilistic inferences" about what they're seeing: Is that character a friend or foe? Are they moving left or right?
"They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster," he said.
Labels: duke-university, greg-appelbaum, milliseconds
