[Cognitive Labs] Gamers: Better Visual Memories

[neurofuture]

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.

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Posted By neurofuture to Cognitive Labs at 6/12/2013 12:59:00 PM