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[ScienceDirect] Study shows 'video game players have improved decision-making abilities and enhanced brain activities'

Maiden Voyage

Gold™ Member

Highlights​

  • Video game players (VGP) are more accurate and faster in decision-making than non-VGP.
  • VGP have increased activity in the brain regions for visuomotor processing.
  • VGP have increased directed network activities to the SMA and to the thalamus.
  • Brain node and network activities negatively correlate with decision response time.


Abstract​

Video game playing is a popular activity which provides a cognitively engaging, sensory rich environment that can lead to cognitive benefits in those who play frequently. How exactly they change our brain to achieve these cognitive benefits has yet to be known. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, we examined the behavioral and brain responses of video game- players (VGP) and non-video game-players (NVGP) during decision-making tasks. In behavioral response, VGP were overall faster by approximately 190 ms and more accurate by 2% than NVGP. In brain response, comparing percent signal changes in commonly activated brain regions between groups, we found that video gamers had increased task-related signal changes in the right lingual gyrus, right supplementary motor area (SMA), and left thalamus associated with improved behavioral response. Directed functional network activities to the right SMA and the left thalamus were also increased. The regional signal changes and network activities of all participants were found to be negatively correlated with decision response time, indicating that higher the node and network activities better the performance. These results provide novel insights into the brain mechanisms that underlie improvements in sensorimotor decision-making abilities due to video game playing.


Summary​

To summarize, this study demonstrated that video game players have improved performance on decision-making tasks and that these differences correlate to specific changes in the node and network activities in and across the lingual gyrus, the supplementary motor area and the thalamus. These results indicate that video game playing potentially enhances several of the subprocesses for sensation, perception and mapping to action to improve decision-making skills. These findings begin to illuminate how video game playing alter the brain in order to improve task performance and their potential implications for increasing task specific activity. This study leads to not only a potential method of cognitive training, but also understanding how the training will affect the brain.
 

Maiden Voyage

Gold™ Member
Do they also talk about our superb love-making skills?
Real gamers save themselves for marriage
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participants indicating playing 5 h per week or more in one of four types of video games genres for the last two years were considered to be video game players. The four types of video game player genres we recruited, based on industry demographics, were First-Person Shooter (FPS), Real-Time Strategy (RTS), Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), and Battle Royale (BR) players
I'm guessing playing modern JRPG button mashers and Uncharted games probably still makes you stupider :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 

Trogdor1123

Member
This is about the same group of people who will hold onto a special potion… forever, just in case. But will drop 15$ on a skin for a virtual game that changes nothing
 

Rex_DX

Gold Member
No idea about the credibility of ScienceDirect but it's nice to see a positive head about the old vidya games every now and then.

I swear there are people on my street who still blame John Romero for the Columbine shooting.

Cool thread Maiden Voyage Maiden Voyage
 

Maiden Voyage

Gold™ Member
I swear there are people on my street who still blame John Romero for the Columbine shooting.
I'm honestly surprised there wasn't more fallout from that whole thing. We went from outraged moms forming the PMRC in the 80s to nothing really negative happening to video games besides bad press.
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
So future generations will have it better because scientists and doctors will have grown up playing games. Actually, the more things change, the more things stay the same (MW2 reference). I bet they’ll say the exact opposite years from now. Video Games get more and more streamlined in production, thus producing little to no results from the person playing the game. Games come with accessibility options. Games are much easier than they use to be. It will all depend on the type of person and if they figured it out or if they took a shortcut.
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
I'm honestly surprised there wasn't more fallout from that whole thing. We went from outraged moms forming the PMRC in the 80s to nothing really negative happening to video games besides bad press.
There’s been a couple big things over the years, mainly in California when the whole photo ID issue was brought up. Video Games are protected by free speech in the US, which you never hear about. The ESRB/PEGI/Cero and etc. exist, so they can’t say there isn’t a warning on the box. The fact that Romero now lives in Ireland might be a testament to the whole thing, but I have zero clue to why he does live in Ireland. You also have a fan base that’s a couple decades old, which is also more than a couple million of people all across the world. Having a bad batch of people reference a video game before they commit a crime isn’t proof of anything.

John Romero has a book coming out next year. It should be really good.
 
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