A cool fact to cheer up the gamers - playing action video games improve brain functions

Love playing action video games, do you? Well, good news! This can help you improve your attention skills, another brain function. Action video games – which feature quickly moving targets, include large amounts of clutter, and that require the user to make rapid, accurate decisions.

Love playing action video games, do you? Well, good news! This can help you improve your attention skills, another brain function. Action video games – which feature quickly moving targets, include large amounts of clutter, and that require the user to make rapid, accurate decisions – have particularly positive cognitive impacts, says a new study. The study claimed that such video games are even better in their impact than ‘brain games’, which are created specifically to improve cognitive function.

How does playing video games help improving learning skills?

Earlier studies have shown that those who play action video gamers tend to excel at several tasks. However this study explains that people excel in tasks because they become better learners by playing the fast-paced action games. When you play a fast-paced video game, your brain keeps predicting what will come next-, even while you’re listening to a conversation, driving, or performing surgery. In order to sharpen its prediction skills, your brains constantly build different models, or templates of the world (of the video game), said Daphne Bavelier, a research professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. Puzzle-based video games actually make you smarter!.

Is the effect long-lasting? 

For the study the team first used a pattern discrimination task to compare action video game players’ visual performance with that of individuals who did not play action video games. Video game can also curb anger issues in children.

The researchers revealed that people who play action gamers had improved performance. The most surprising part of the study is the fact that when these gamers were tested months to a year later, they still outperformed other participants. This suggests that your brain has the ability to retain the models it builds and use it effectively in future. 

‘Action video games have been linked to improving attention skills, brain processing, and cognitive functions, including low-level vision through high-level cognitive abilities,’ said lead researcher C. Shawn Green from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ‘Many other types of games do not produce an equivalent impact on perception and cognition,’ he added. Brain games typically embody few of the qualities of the commercial video games linked with cognitive improvement, the researchers noted. 

Furthermore, video games are known to impact not only cognitive function, but many other aspects of behaviour – including social functions – and this impact can be either positive or negative depending on the content of the games. ‘Modern video games have evolved into sophisticated experiences that instantiate many principles known by psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators to be fundamental to altering behaviour, producing learning, and promoting brain plasticity.

Anything has its own limit, so does gaing and that is : playing too many video games can lead alzheimer’s disease.