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Testing Gamer vs Non-Gamer Brains: How Do Video Games Affect You? | WIRED

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Megan Fox has admitted being a Halo: Reach addict in an interview with Collider

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The Hollywood star from Fast and Furious has his very own game developer called Tigon Studios.

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Henry Cavill's addiction to World of Warcraft nearly cost him his role in Superman.

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Players concerned with overeating, smoking, or drinking may be best served by instead reaching for a Gameboy.

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Playing Tetris Will Make You Forget You're Hungry

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Scientists find that video games like Tetris help distract test subjects from feeling hungry.

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Some games can slow down aging in the brain

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Some games can slow down aging in the brain

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It has been shown that  "brain games" involving problem - solving, memory and puzzle components benefit older players strongly. In one study, only 10 hours of play in participants 50 and older resulted in increased cognitive functioning — an improvement that lasted for several years.

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Credit: Artem Chernyshevych | Stock Xchng

Challenging yourself with a brain-teasing game for just two hours a week may help slow the degree of mental decay associated with the natural aging process, a new study finds.

Researchers at the University of Iowa in Iowa City conducted a study of 681 healthy individuals, ages 50 and older. They found that people who played 10 hours of a specially designed video game that focused on improving the speed and quality of mental processing abilities were able to delay the natural decline of a range of cognitive skills - in some cases, by up to seven years, said Fredric Wolinsky, a professor in the University of Iowa's College of Public Health and lead author of the new study.

"We've shown that 10 hours is enough to slow the decline by several years," Wolinsky told LiveScience. "We saw a range across all our tests from a minimum of a year-and-a-half all the way up to about six-and-a-half years of recovery or improvement. From just 10 to 14 hours of training, that's quite a lot of improvement." [ 10 Fun Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp]

Wolinsky and his colleagues randomly separated the participants into four groups, then divided them again into two categories: those ages 50 to 64, and those over 65.

Over the course of five to eight weeks, one group was given computerized crossword puzzles to complete, while the other three groups played a computer game called "Road Tour."

The game requires players to identify and match a picture of a vehicle (either a car or a truck) at the center of the screen with a series of road signs that are displayed in surrounding circles, one of which is a Route 66 road sign. The goal is to correctly identify the car type while also remembering the position of the Route 66 sign, which, in each level, is presented alongside a number of other incorrect, or "distractor," signs inside the other circles. The timed exercise is designed to test the player's mental processing speed.

"The game doesn't progress to the next level until you're performing the current level correct 75 percent of the time," Wolinsky explained. "The way we challenge people is that eventually we show the vehicle and signs for less time on the screen, and over time, we increase the number of distractor signs."

A screenshot from the "Road Tour" video game. Research shows that video games that challenge cognitive processing speeds may help delay mental declines associated with the natural aging process.

Credit: Fred Wolinsky lab, University of Iowa

Widening the field of view

The Road Tour game also tests the player's field of view. As participants move to higher levels, the circles containing the road signs inch away from the center of the screen, moving closer to the edge of the monitor.

"This shows how far out in the periphery someone can take in information accurately," Wolinsky said. "As we age, our visual field starts to collapse in on us, so we start to have less and less peripheral vision, and we can't see it as well."

This may be one reason why the rate of motor vehicle accidents is higher among older adults, and why so many of these accidents occur at intersections, where drivers have to process information from multiple fields of view, the researchers said. [ Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time]

The study participants were assessed at the start of the experiment, at the end of the five- to eight-week period and then again a year later. The people who played the Road Tour game for at least 10 hours - either at the researchers' lab or in their own homes - showed about 70 percent improvement in their speed of mental processing.

Using a formula developed by the researchers, these participants also demonstrated at least three years of cognitive improvement when tested after one year, Wolinsky said.

Challenging the brain

"The findings clearly show that it is possible to improve older adults' cognitive functioning," said Jason Allaire, an associate professor in the department of psychology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who was not involved with the study. "It highlights the training approach and is focused on a lot of dividing attention and task-functioning, which is important to exercise in older adults."

Allaire is co-director of North Carolina State University's Gains Through Gaming Lab, which conducts extensive research on the health benefits of video games, though he said he considers Road Tour to be more of a computerized training approach than a traditional video game.

Still, the new research highlights the importance of flexing your brain, particularly as you age, Allaire said.

"Whether it's a specially manufactured game or something like "World of Warcraft," games are cognitively complex and require mental energy and abilities to play them," he said. "Whenever you do anything that requires mental energy, you're exercising your abilities - it's just like if you exercise your muscles, you get stronger."

Road Tour is commercially available through a company called Posit Science, though Wolinsky said he does not have a financial stake in product. Posit Science also offers a Web-based version of the game for a monthly fee.

The results of the new study were published Wednesday (May 1) in the journal PLOS ONE.

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Challenging yourself with a brain-teasing game for just two hours a week may help slow the degree of mental decay associated with the natural aging process, a new study finds. Researchers at the University of Iowa in Iowa City conducted a study of 681 healthy individuals, ages 50 and older.

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Some people seem to believe playing video games may decrease the attention span of children. But researchers argue the opposite. Brain scans show that kids who regularly play video games are better at filtering out distractions than non-gamers.

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Summary: Researchers report playing action video games increases performance on visual selective activities. Players had increased focus on relevant visual information while suppressing less relevant information.
Source: University of Arkansas.
Researchers have demonstrated that just one hour spent playing video games has an effect on the brain. The research team found changes in brain activity and increased performance on tests of visual selective activity in subjects who had spent one hour playing the League of Legends video game. Their results are published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Weiyi Ma, assistant professor of human development and family sciences in the University of Arkansas School of Human Environmental Sciences, collaborated with researchers at the Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of the Ministry of Education of China, one of the leading research centers for neuroscience in China. Dezhong Yao and Diankun Gong direct the Key Laborator and serve as co-authors of the article.
STUDY DESIGN
Twenty-nine male students at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China participated in the study. The students were identified as either experts, who had at least two years of experience playing action video games and were ranked in the top seven percent of League of Legends players, and non-experts, who had less than half a year of experience and were ranked in the lowest 11 percent of players.

Before and after playing the video game, the participants' visual selective attention was assessed. Visual selective attention refers to the brain's ability to focus on relevant visual information while suppressing less relevant information. Processing information uses energy, so individuals who excel at visual selective attention-who can narrow their focus and block out distractions-are using their brains more efficiently.

To assess visual selective attention, the researchers briefly showed each subject a square in the center of a computer screen. Then another square flashed in a different part of the screen and the subject was asked to identify the position of the second square relative to the first. During the course of the experiment, the researchers also monitored brain activity associated with attention using electroencephalography, or EEG.
RESULTS
The researchers observed that in the initial assessment, the expert gamers had more brain activity associated with attention than the non-experts. The experts also scored better on the initial visual selective attention assessment.

After the hour long video game session, both the experts and non-experts had improved visual selective attention, and the two groups received similar scores on the post-game assessment. The non-experts also showed changes in brain activity, according to the EEG data. After the gaming session, their brain activity was similar to that of the experts.

The researchers explained that, while these results suggest that short periods of video gaming can change brain activity and improve attention skills, they point out that further research is needed to see how long these effects last. "These findings by no means suggest that expertise acquisition can be completed within one hour," they wrote in the paper. "Indeed, research has shown that expertise acquisition is a protracted process that may take years to complete."

About this neuroscience research article

Source: Camilla Shumaker - University of Arkansas
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to the researchers.
Original Research: Open access research in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00047

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

Abstract Rapid Improvement in Visual Selective Attention Related to Action Video Gaming Experience
A central issue in cognitive science is understanding how learning induces cognitive and neural plasticity, which helps illuminate the biological basis of learning. Research in the past few decades showed that action video gaming (AVG) offered new, important perspectives on learning-related cognitive and neural plasticity. However, it is still unclear whether cognitive and neural plasticity is observable after a brief AVG session. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, this study examined the plasticity of visual selective attention (VSA) associated with a 1 h AVG session. Both AVG experts and non-experts participated in this study. Their VSA was assessed prior to and after the AVG session. Within-group comparisons on the participants' performance before and after the AVG session showed improvements in response time in both groups and modulations of electrophysiological measures in the non-experts. Furthermore, between-group comparisons showed that the experts had superior VSA, relative to the non-experts, prior to the AVG session. These findings suggested an association between the plasticity of VSA and AVG. Most importantly, this study showed that the plasticity of VSA was observable after even a 1 h AVG session.

Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.

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One Hour of Video Gaming Can Increase the Brain's Ability to Focus

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Summary: Researchers report playing action video games increases performance on visual selective activities. Players had increased focus on relevant visual information while suppressing less relevant information. Source: University of Arkansas. Researchers have demonstrated that just one hour spent playing video games has an effect on the brain.

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A study was done with a group of 10 kids with dyslexia playing video games. It was shown that their speed of reading was heightened without any effect on accuracy. This is effective because gaming requires intense focus.

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Playing video games may help children with dyslexia improve their reading skills, research suggests.

A study of 10-year-olds who played 12 hours of an "action" video game found it improved their reading speed without any cost to accuracy.

The effects were equivalent to more than a year's worth of reading development, the Italian team reported in Current Biology.

But more research was needed before games could be considered a treatment.

Their work builds on earlier research in which they linked dyslexia with early problems in visual attention rather than language skills.

They selected a fast-moving game requiring a high degree of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills as well as being unpredictable and involving peripheral processing.

Ten children spent nine 80-minute sessions playing the video game, which consisted of a series of mini-games.

And their reading and attention skills were compared before and after with 10 children not exposed to the game.

There are questions as to the extent that skills transfer from one situation to another and would be retained in the longer term.
Dr Kate Saunders, British Dyslexia Association

Speed and accuracy

The researchers found those who had played the video games had better attention skills than before.

And they were able to read faster without losing any accuracy, the team from the University of Padua reported.

Study leader, Dr Andrea Facoetti, said: "Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment.

"Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."

He explained that attention should be thought of as a "spotlight" that can be moved, and adjusted in its size, in the visual field.

When the spotlight is on a portion of the visual field, the details will be enhanced, the contrast improved and so on, while everything that is outside of this spotlight will be inhibited.

The video games may be working to train the part of the brain responsible for attention and motion perception, he added.

"These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision," he said.

The team are now planning to look at the effects of video games on the prevention of dyslexia in children before they learn to read.

Dr Kate Saunders, chief executive of the British Dyslexia Association, said it was a complex condition but for some individuals part of the problem may include difficulty with aspects of visual perceptual skills, and visuo-motor coordination and attention.

She added that more research was needed to establish whether repeated play on some targeted computer games could help build certain visual and attention related skills.

"There are questions, however, as to the extent that skills transfer from one situation to another and would be retained in the longer term."

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Playing video games may help children with dyslexia improve their reading skills, research suggests. A study of 10-year-olds who played 12 hours of an "action" video game found it improved their reading speed without any cost to accuracy. The effects were equivalent to more than a year's worth of reading development, the Italian team reported in Current Biology.

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Many people think gaming is a mindless waste of time, contributes to bad health, and bad grades in school. Recent studies are proving these people differently.

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Surgeons who played video games in the past for at least 3 hours per week had 37 percent fewer errors and a 27 percent faster completion rate for laparoscopic surgery and suturing compared to surgeons who never played video games.

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Scientists found associations between the use of high video games and improved social skills and performance at school. Young children who play a lot of video games may have better intellectual and social skills than their peers who do not play games

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Connect online

Gamers have the ability to connect with players locally or team up with people from countries around the world. A large proportion of young people playing multiplayer games have developed good friendships with people they met online.

Video games have created a fun and engaging way of connecting with people and can act as an important teaching tool in developing social skills. Video games can help develop cooperation skills and supporting skills as players have the option to work together to form alliances and create teams working cooperatively. Many video games often result in better outcomes if players work together, encouraging players to be social. Video games also provide the players with the opportunity to take a leader's position, which requires greater social networking skills and team work to keep other players happy.

These skills are important in the outside world for creating and maintaining friendships, especially in school and work environments. Studies have shown that playing video games, including violent video games can create and improve friendships amongst players. Players can be fighting against each other in the game but are developing their friendship as they work together and share the experience.

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Social development as a benefit of playing video games

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Gamers have the ability to connect with players locally or team up with people from countries around the world. A large proportion of young people playing multiplayer games have developed good friendships with people they met online. Video games have created a fun and engaging way of connecting with people and can act as an important teaching tool in developing social skills.

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