Friday, May 4, 2012
First person shooters improve driving skills
All you gamers out there – it’s time to rejoice.
If your parents are constantly telling you that you’ll get square eyes, or your brain will rot, or your young mind will be influenced into committing violent crimes due to the shooting games you play on the console of your choice – they might stop when you tell them the results of recent research. Scientists at the University of Toronto tested 25 people. None of them had ever played video games – no I don’t know where they found these people – and they were split into two groups.
One group of 16 played 10 hours of first person shoot-m-up games in one to two hour sittings, and a control group of nine played 3D puzzle games.
Previous to being given games to play their brain waves had been measured while they tried their hand at a visual attention task. After the game playing was over, their brain waves were tested again while performing the same type of visual attention task.
The results showed that individuals who had been playing shooting games had significantly different brain waves recorded during the visual attention task, and had improved at the task too.
The 3D puzzle game lot showed no improvement.
In a nut-shell – playing first person shooters could improve your visual awareness on the road and reduce the risk of you suffering a crash!
Photo © Fey llyas via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence
Labels: awareness, brain waves, crash, puzzle games, road, shooting games, University of Toronto, visual attention
#
posted by Fuse @ 12:45 AM 
Post a Comment