Another Study Claims Video Games Make us Faster Learners, Too

It seems Gamerzunite is the place to be if you're a gamer or a psychologist these days, because we have ANOTHER scientific study worth publishing!   Take out those textbooks and get ready to scribble some notes, because not only can we enjoy the fact that games aren't making us more violent, we can also take pride in the fact that they're probably making you smarter!

At least, action games are.  And more specifically, they don't make you smarter, per se, they make you better able to adapt to new perception-based challenges.  Or, to put it more simply, action games make you a faster learner if this new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is anything to go off of.

The study asked groups of individuals to take part in a perception challenge, which demanded the participants identify the orientation of fuzzy blotches on a screen while several, varying levels of distracting noise played in the background.   According to the study, this task was designed to be difficult, but get easier over time as you adjusted to it.   The results of this test, however, was striking:  gamers who played action games were not only scored better on the test, but also completed it faster than their non-gaming counterparts.

But thats not the remarkable part. The author of the study, Vikranth Bejjanki, explains:
 

"You might have expected that people who played action video games were better at this task at the outset.   But that wasn't the case--both groups were about equal to begin with. Rather, as a function of being exposed to this new task, the action gamers became better at the task. They could more rapidly extract what was needed to do well."

It's an exciting result, but it's not perfect: Walter Boot, a psychologist at the Florda State University, suggests that rather than action games making people learn faster, it's the other way around for people who learn faster are drawn to action games, where their abilities help them do well. 

Well, no matter the case, it's good for Action gamers one way or the other, congradulations on being smarter than the rest of us!  I'll be sitting here, waiting for someone to publish a study claiming RTS gamers are better at making mountains of money.