At some point during your youth years, every child faced the life of playing video games. But as time went on some kids drifted away while some continued to play. But have you ever been sitting there and have your mom yell at you, saying that you are not learning anything sitting there. But what if that wasn’t the case, rather kids who play video games may learn quicker than those who don’t at all. Well over the last couple years’ studies have started to be released trying to this point. The question arises on how kids who sit in front of a TV screen could possibly be smarter than those who don’t. This is when researchers from Brown University stepped in and performed a study on this topic.
Kids who seem to play a lot of video games seem to have a significant advantage over kids who don’t in certain categories. Playing online games gives these kids a greater ability to critically think in particular situations. This could partially due to a lot of these games make you get through different levels that have different strategies. With each one being different, it makes you think in so many ways. These researchers hand selected a few avid video gamers who played for a decent amount of time, and placed them against people who don’t see themselves as consistent players at all. From here these participants went through a serious of experiments and exercises where they are shown different patterns on a screen and had to spot different abnormalities. Over time the researchers asked the participants to go through a series of rounds where they had to point out these abnormalities on the screen. Apparently if you move too fast through the levels, it can skew the data and in fact affect the knowledge that you are acquiring.
This Picture is what the subjects were tested with. They had to recognize the lines that don’t fit in as part of the test.
On the first round of the task, the consistent gamers showed a relatively big increase in their quickness when looking for the abnormalities on the screen, but seemed to drop off when it came to the second round. On the other hand, the ones that are not considered gamers had the opposite production. The second task they had a greater improvement rather than the first one (Results to Study Here). The researchers remained confident with their results, disregarding the size of the group that they were studying. To avoid any outliers that could possibly skew their data, they tend to stay away from individuals who have an extreme amount of playing experience. To this day, researchers don’t quite know the specifics on why gamers have the ability to excel in some of these activities, but it is thought they have the ability to process visual task better because of certain mechanisms. It can clearly be appointed to that these avid gamers haven’t spent numerous hours over the last couple of years playing games, increasing their visual training over time.
Although that it isn’t scientifically proven that video games in fact makes you smarter, but evidence that has been released from this small sample study might help the start of a new thinking. The evidence that has been gathered certainly points the topic in the right direction, maybe changing the view that video games can have a positive impact on a child’s life. Maybe we can begin to transition from the stage of mom yelling out you, to mom encouraging you to play different types of games to increase intelligence.
Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3021273/Do-video-games-make-SMARTER-Gamers-learn-quickly-don-t-play.html (For Picture Also)
Growing up, I always played video games. My friends and I would go online and socially interact through the online game. Personally, it gave me leisure outside of the work that I was supposed to be doing. There always should be a balance between leisure and work, it betters everyone’s health and lowers stress. A balance between work and leisure produces more productivity in the workplace, which was stated in this article.
As a lover of video games this post was interesting to me. I have played video games for many years as I’m sure a lot of us have, and it is good to see that all of those hours spent in front of the TV may have a positive effect on my thinking and learning abilities.