Have you been reprimanded by your parents while playing a lot of video games? Have you ever been told that playing video games is useless and it would lead to nothing in the end? Well, if that’s the case then you might want to read this and share it with your parents!
According to a study, long-term experience of action real-time strategy games such as action video games—like God of War, Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and online strategy-based games like World of Warcraft, Age of Empires, and Total War can cause long-term variations in the brain and can improve your temporal visual selective attention.
These games which require a lot of strategic planning, selective attention and teamwork place considerable demands on the brain and doing it over a long time enables the brain to get used to these activities.
According to a research paper published in the journal: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, players who have been playing real-time action and strategy games for a long period of time and have established mastery over the games are reported to have faster information processing, can allocate more cognitive power to individual visual stimuli and distribute limited cognitive resources faster.
To study the effect of gaming on temporal visual selective attention, the research team from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, selected 38 volunteers, young male students.
Fifty percent of the volunteers were expert players of the real-time action strategy game League of Legends, while the others were beginners, with less than six-months experience of the same game.
All volunteers were tested in a blink task, with 480 trials for around two hours. All the LOL players also wore EEG electrodes on their sides and top region of their scalp, allowing the researchers to determine and localize the brain’s activity during the experiment.
The study conclusively declared that expert players outperformed the beginners in both the tasks, they were less prone to blink effect and could locate targets faster and more easily.
Hence it was concluded that video games significantly reduce reaction times without sacrificing accuracy. This increase in speed can also be observed across various tasks beyond gaming situations. Playing video games can, therefore, provide an effective training regimen to increase the speed of reaction without decreasing the accuracy of performance.