Playing video games can boost your brain: Researchers say action games increase our ability to quickly learn new motor skills

  • Regular players learn a new sensorimotor skills, such as riding a bike or typing, more quickly than non-gamers
  • Games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed singled out as most effective

By Mark Prigg for MailOnline

Published: | Updated:

Playing quick paced action video games such as  Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed can boost your ability to learn new motor skills, researchers have found.

They say regular players seem to learn a new sensorimotor skills, such as riding a bike or typing, more quickly than non-gamers do.

They say the skills are highly in demand, and useful for many careers - such as advanced surgery, for instance.

Liverpool and England footballer Daniel Sturridge competing at the unveiling of the Call of Duty : Ghosts game: Now researchers say playing quick paced action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed can boost your ability to learn new skills.

Liverpool and England footballer Daniel Sturridge competing at the unveiling of the Call of Duty : Ghosts game: Now researchers say playing quick paced action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed can boost your ability to learn new skills.

SENSORIMOTOR SKILLS

 A new sensorimotor skill, such as learning to ride a bike or typing, often requires a new pattern of coordination between vision and motor movement. 

With such skills, an individual generally moves from novice performance, characterized by a low degree of coordination, to expert performance, marked by a high degree of coordination. 

As a result of successful sensorimotor learning, one comes to perform these tasks efficiently and perhaps even without consciously thinking about them.

The University of Toronto study discovered people who play action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed seem to learn a new sensorimotor skill more quickly than non-gamers do.

A new sensorimotor skill, such as learning to ride a bike or typing, often requires a new pattern of coordination between vision and motor movement. 

With such skills, an individual generally moves from novice performance, characterized by a low degree of coordination, to expert performance, marked by a high degree of coordination. 

As a result of successful sensorimotor learning, one comes to perform these tasks efficiently and perhaps even without consciously thinking about them, the researchers say.

'We wanted to understand if chronic video game playing has an effect on sensorimotor control, that is, the coordinated function of vision and hand movement,' said graduate student Davood Gozli, who led the study.

In the early stages of doing the tasks, the gamers' performance was not significantly better than non-gamers. 

'This suggests that while chronically playing action video games requires constant motor control, playing these games does not give gamers a reliable initial advantage in new and unfamiliar sensorimotor tasks,' said Gozli.

HOW THEY DID IT

Researchers set up two experiments.

In the first, 18 gamers (those who played a first-person shooter game at least three times per week for at least two hours each time in the previous six months) and 18 non-gamers (who had little or no video game use in the past two years) performed a manual tracking task. 

Using a computer mouse, they were instructed to keep a small green square cursor at the centre of a white square moving target which moved in a very complicated pattern that repeated itself.

The task probes sensorimotor control, because participants see the target movement and try to coordinate their hand movements with what they see.

By the end of the experiment, all participants performed better as they learned the complex pattern of the target.

The gamers, however, were significantly more accurate in following the repetitive motion than the non-gamers. 

'This is likely due to the gamers' superior ability in learning a novel sensorimotor pattern, that is, their gaming experience enabled them to learn better than the non-gamers.'

In the next experiment, the researchers wanted to test whether the superior performance of the gamers was indeed a result of learning rather than simply having better sensorimotor control. 

To eliminate the learning component of the experiment, they required participants to again track a moving dot, but in this case the patterns of motion changed throughout the experiment. 

Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare: Gaming experience enabled people to learn new motor skills better than the non-gamers in a test

Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare: Gaming experience enabled people to learn new motor skills better than the non-gamers in a test

The result this time: neither the gamers nor the non-gamers improved as time went by, confirming that learning was playing a key role and the gamers were learning better.

One of the benefits of playing action games may be an enhanced ability to precisely learn the dynamics of new sensorimotor tasks. 

Assassins Creed Liberation, another game the team found helped give people the ability to develop new motor skills quickly

Assassins Creed Liberation, another game the team found helped give people the ability to develop new motor skills quickly

Such skills are key, for example, in laparoscopic surgery which involves high precision manual control of remote surgery tools through a computer interface.

The research was done in collaboration with Daphne Bavelier who has appointments with both the University of Geneva and the University of Rochester.

Their study is published in the journal Human Movement Science.

 

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