Hours of playing video games can change brain for the better, research finds Video games can change a person's brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better. A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability. People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25 percent faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study. Indeed, the most adept gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second -- four times faster than most people, other researchers found. Moreover, practiced game players can pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that someone can normally keep in mind, said University of Rochester researchers. Electronic gameplay has its downside. "Video games change your brain," said University of Wisconsin psychologist C.
Video games and health Top 5 Health Benefits from Playing Video Games By: Fidan Mustafayeva Many people have prejudiced notions that video games make us violent, anti-social, and fat (since most games don’t require a lot of physical movement). While gaming is not necessarily considered the healthiest hobby but there are actually many health benefits that come from video games. 1. In a study conducted by the 2009 Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine, it was found that gamers who suffered from mental stress or depression were able to use video games to vent out their frustrations. 2. As crazy as it sounds, video games can also help relieve physical pain. 3. A study in the journal of Current Directions in Psychological Science, showed that people who played video games had faster reflexes than people who did not. 4. The University of Rochester conducted a study by checking the vision of a group of people who played action video games for a few hours a day for a month. 5. Sources: Don’t Just Be Fit, Be Gamer Fit
Video games improve decision-making skills - Technology & science - Science - LiveScience Video games really could make your mind sharper by improving your decision-making skills, a new study finds. Past research showed that people who play action video games have faster reaction times than those who don't play the games. Action video games typically refer to "shooter games, where you go through a maze and you don't know when a villain will appear," said researcher Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York. Still, one could argue that action games just make gamers trigger-happy, apt to react quickly but not accurately. After all, action games are "not exactly what you'd think of as mind-enhancing," Bavelier said. Now scientists find action gamers apparently are better at making quick and accurate decisions, ones based on details they extract from their surroundings. "It is quite unusual to find a training regimen that seems to benefit so many different aspects of behavior," Bavelier told LiveScience. © 2012 LiveScience.com.
University of Geneva - Geneva Neuroscience Center Research activities: A distinctive feature of the human brain is its capacity to learn and adapt to an ever-changing environment. What are the factors that promote such learning and brain plasticity? Are some parts of our nervous system more plastic than others, making some skills easier to acquire? Answers to these questions are central to basic science, education, clinical rehabilitation, and aging. Group website: Selected Publications: Green, C.S., Pouget, A., & Bavelier, D. (2010) Improved probabilistic inference, as a general learning mechanism with action video games. Contact: Psychology and Education Sciences Email: Daphne (dot) Bavelier (at) unige (dot) ch