Over the past several years, I
have written about a number of studies relating to video games. It looks like playing video games can
distract students from school, which can lead to poorer grades. Video games can also promote risk taking,
which can lead to riskier behavior in life as well. Although video games may promote somewhat
more aggressive behavior in laboratory settings, it has been hard to find any
evidence that they lead to more aggressive behavior outside of the lab.
On the positive side, playing
prosocial video games can lead to more helping behavior in the lab. There has been a flurry of studies exploring
whether playing video games also helps with thinking skills.
One way that video games might
influence thinking is by affecting the way people process their visual
world. A person playing a first-person
shooter, for example needs to identify friends and enemies quickly and then
make fast decisions based on what they see.
The prospect that playing action
video games could improve perception was explored in a paper in the October,
2014 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
by Don van Ravnzwaaij, Wouter Boekel, Birte Forstmann, Roger Ratcliff, and
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers.
In one study, they had three
groups of participants. One group played
20 hours of the action video game Unreal
Tournament. A second group played a
non-action game (The Sims). A third group played no game at all. The 20 hours of play were spread over six
experimental sessions over the course of a week.
In each session, participants
also did a difficult perceptual task in which they had to detect the motion of
dots on a screen. Some proportion of the
dots were moving in a consistent direction, while the rest moved randomly. Participants had to detect the coherent
motion of the majority of the dots. The
proportion of dots moving in the same direction was determined at the beginning
of the study in order for participants to start the study at about a 75%
accuracy level.
Over the course of the study,
participants in all groups got faster (and slightly less accurate) at making
the judgments of motion. However, all of
the groups improved at the same rate regardless of whether they played a video
game or what type of game they played.
In this study and a second one
replicating this finding, the authors found no evidence that playing an action
video game improves a basic perceptual skill like the ability to detect motion
in a particular direction.
One reason that I like this study
is that this research group is well-known for careful experimentation and
detailed data analysis. When exploring
complex phenomena like the influence of video games on learning, it is valuable
to have experimenters who are careful in their research.
Of course, the results from this
one paper do not argue that video games cannot improve more complex
skills. But, this finding is valuable in
suggesting that whatever improvements video games may provide, they do not
reach all the way down to the most basic aspects of visual perception. More research will be needed to explore the
kinds of thinking abilities that video game play may improve.
