Video games are the new books now it seems, as a new study reveals the benefits of the digital media to the brain, particularly action-oriented video games.
The University of Geneva (UNIGE) in Switzerland has conducted two meta-analyses on research spanning the last 15 years to see how video games affect how the brain works. It turns out, video games are good for expanding cognitive abilities like perception, attention, and reaction time. This is because the human brain is quite malleable, and even past studies have linked action video games to improved cognitive abilities both in children and adults.
What makes UNIGE's research different from all the past ones is that they seem to have focused their scope solely on first-person shooters, mostly war games like "Call of Duty," "Battlefield," etc. "We decided to assemble all the relevant data from 2000 to 2015 in an attempt to answer this question, as it was the only way to have a proper overview of the real impact of action video games," said Daphne Bavelier, a professor in the Psychology Section at UNIGE.
Participants were subjected to several tests which measured their capacity for spatial awareness and they, in turn, displayed results such as being able to detect a dog in a herd of animals. They also displayed better cognitive abilities than those who did not play video games.
The researchers at UNIGE, however, have also taken in to account whether the video game ability or the cognitive ability came first. The research is also considering whether the people have long developed more advanced cognitive abilities than others, hence their being better at action video games. Still, they posit that it could be the other way around, where the video games honed the players' brains to have better cognitive abilities.
It is worth noting that the test consisted of people aged from 6 to 40 years who played video games at least eight hours per week. Some changes are detrimental, however, as binging games can lead to the shrinkage of the hippocampus, which makes the person more susceptible to depression, Alzheimer's disease, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), so moderation is advised for gamers.
