As was the case with comics in the 1950s, which were seen as harmful to children, video games also suffered, especially in the early 2000s, with parents worried that games (from violent examples) could harm the formation and sociability of their children. . In these years, a lot has changed and it is already difficult to draw a trend from isolated cases — but in terms of science, now a study suggests that gamers tend to have brains with enhanced activity.
In a Georgia State University research, games appear as a useful tool to develop sensorimotor decision-making skills in key regions of the brain. The tests were even based on an experience of one of the researchers —Tim Jordan, PhD in physics and astronomy—, who says he has improved his visual processing capacity in an almost blind eye from his experience as a gamer as a child. The research would also like to contribute to the understanding of the possible benefits of the activity in general.
In this case, there were 47 participants in the university age group, 28 of them classified as gamers and another 19 as people who do not play often. Hence, a functional MRI scan was performed, in which people saw moving points and had to press a button on their right or left hand according to the direction in which the points were moving, or not press anything at all if the points were moving. were stopped.
The general result, as might be expected, was that gamers were faster and more accurate in their answers. In this, the study concluded that “video game playing potentially improves several of the sub-processes of sensation, perception and mapping to action to improve decision-making skills”.
“These findings begin to shed light on how video game play alters the brain to improve task performance and its possible implications for increasing task-specific activity,” the researchers said in a release note.
The video game, finally, is seen as a potential candidate for cognitive training experiments in decision making, the study concludes.
