ACTION VIDEO GAMES BOLSTER SENSORIMOTOR SKILLS
University of Toronto
study finds that action video games bolster sensorimotor skills
A study led by
University of Toronto psychology researchers has found that people who play
action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed seem to learn a new
sensorimotor skill more quickly than non-gamers do.
A new sensorimotor
skill, such as learning to ride a bike or typing, often requires a new pattern
of coordination between vision and motor movement. With such skills, an
individual generally moves from novice performance, characterized by a low
degree of coordination, to expert performance, marked by a high degree of
coordination. As a result of successful sensorimotor learning, one comes to
perform these tasks efficiently and perhaps even without consciously thinking
about them.
"We wanted to
understand if chronic video game playing has an effect on sensorimotor control,
that is, the coordinated function of vision and hand movement," said
graduate student Davood Gozli, who led the study with supervisor Jay Pratt.
To find out, they set
up two experiments. In the first, 18 gamers (those who played a first-person
shooter game at least three times per week for at least two hours each time in
the previous six months) and 18 non-gamers (who had little or no video game use
in the past two years) performed a manual tracking task. Using a computer
mouse, they were instructed to keep a small green square cursor at the centre
of a white square moving target which moved in a very complicated pattern that
repeated itself. The task probes sensorimotor control, because participants see
the target movement and try to coordinate their hand movements with what they
see.
In the early stages of
doing the tasks, the gamers' performance was not significantly better than
non-gamers. "This suggests that while chronically playing action video
games requires constant motor control, playing these games does not give gamers
a reliable initial advantage in new and unfamiliar sensorimotor tasks,"
said Gozli.
By the end of the
experiment, all participants performed better as they learned the complex
pattern of the target. The gamers, however, were significantly more accurate in
following the repetitive motion than the non-gamers. "This is likely due
to the gamers' superior ability in learning a novel sensorimotor pattern, that
is, their gaming experience enabled them to learn better than the
non-gamers."
In the next
experiment, the researchers wanted to test whether the superior performance of
the gamers was indeed a result of learning rather than simply having better
sensorimotor control. To eliminate the learning component of the experiment,
they required participants to again track a moving dot, but in this case the
patterns of motion changed throughout the experiment. The result this time:
neither the gamers nor the non-gamers improved as time went by, confirming that
learning was playing a key role and the gamers were learning better.
One of the benefits of
playing action games may be an enhanced ability to precisely learn the dynamics
of new sensorimotor tasks. Such skills are key, for example, in laparoscopic
surgery which involves high precision manual control of remote surgery tools
through a computer interface.
The research was done
in collaboration with Daphne Bavelier who has appointments with both the
University of Geneva and the University of Rochester.
Their study is
published in the journal Human Movement Science.
Comments
Post a Comment