Posts tagged video games
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Study finds action video games bolster sensorimotor skills
A study led by University of Toronto psychology researchers has found that people who play action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed seem to learn a new sensorimotor skill more quickly than non-gamers do.
A new sensorimotor skill, such as learning to ride a bike or typing, often requires a new pattern of coordination between vision and motor movement. With such skills, an individual generally moves from novice performance, characterized by a low degree of coordination, to expert performance, marked by a high degree of coordination. As a result of successful sensorimotor learning, one comes to perform these tasks efficiently and perhaps even without consciously thinking about them.
“We wanted to understand if chronic video game playing has an effect on sensorimotor control, that is, the coordinated function of vision and hand movement,” said graduate student Davood Gozli, who led the study with supervisor Jay Pratt.
To find out, they set up two experiments. In the first, 18 gamers (those who played a first-person shooter game at least three times per week for at least two hours each time in the previous six months) and 18 non-gamers (who had little or no video game use in the past two years) performed a manual tracking task. Using a computer mouse, they were instructed to keep a small green square cursor at the centre of a white square moving target which moved in a very complicated pattern that repeated itself. The task probes sensorimotor control, because participants see the target movement and try to coordinate their hand movements with what they see.
In the early stages of doing the tasks, the gamers’ performance was not significantly better than non-gamers. “This suggests that while chronically playing action video games requires constant motor control, playing these games does not give gamers a reliable initial advantage in new and unfamiliar sensorimotor tasks,” said Gozli.
By the end of the experiment, all participants performed better as they learned the complex pattern of the target. The gamers, however, were significantly more accurate in following the repetitive motion than the non-gamers. “This is likely due to the gamers’ superior ability in learning a novel sensorimotor pattern, that is, their gaming experience enabled them to learn better than the non-gamers.”
In the next experiment, the researchers wanted to test whether the superior performance of the gamers was indeed a result of learning rather than simply having better sensorimotor control. To eliminate the learning component of the experiment, they required participants to again track a moving dot, but in this case the patterns of motion changed throughout the experiment. The result this time: neither the gamers nor the non-gamers improved as time went by, confirming that learning was playing a key role and the gamers were learning better.
One of the benefits of playing action games may be an enhanced ability to precisely learn the dynamics of new sensorimotor tasks. Such skills are key, for example, in laparoscopic surgery which involves high precision manual control of remote surgery tools through a computer interface.
(Source: media.utoronto.ca)
Gaming vs. reading: Do they benefit teenagers with cognition or school performance?
Children have an increasing attraction towards electronic media in their play. With video games, phones and the internet in abundance, this article in Educational Psychology examines if such leisure activity is impacting children’s cognition or academic performance or whether it would be more beneficial to read.
After a busy day children do need downtime to rest and relax. Increasingly kids leisure time is spent gaming, but does it detract from homework or would kids be better off reading a book? Historical research shows in some cases that interactive gaming can have positive effects for cognition by promoting memory, attention and reasoning. Other speed oriented games have been shown to improve perception and motor skills, so should gaming for relaxation be encouraged? Lieury et al investigate whether type of leisure activity produces a ‘transfer effect’ influencing learning processes thus improving student performance at school. With an emphasis on gaming and reading they linked patterns of leisure activity with performance in phonology, reading and comprehension, maths, long term memory and reasoning. Fascinatingly gaming previously thought to improve fluid intelligence showed little or no positive correlations to performance whilst reading did, particularly in memory and comprehension. It seems then despite lack of a causal link that reading may be more likely to enhance academic performance.
Should we assume that time spent gaming and away from homework is harmful to students? A further comparison of reading and gaming to most frequent leisure activities showed no negative patterns but interestingly resting had a favourable effect on performance as well as reading. So frequent leisure activity is not necessarily harmful to progress, or always at the expense of homework but can be enriching. The authors conclude “we think that video games are mainly recreational activities and the cognitive stimulation provided is very different from school learning. On the contrary, the results of this survey fully justify the educational role of parents and teachers in promoting reading.”
(Image: Shutterstock)
A little video gaming ‘produces well-adjusted children’
Playing video games for a short period each day could have a small but positive impact on child development, a study by Oxford University suggests.
Scientists found young people who spent less than an hour a day engaged in video games were better adjusted than those who did not play at all.
But children who used consoles for more than three hours reported lower satisfaction with their lives overall.
The research is published in the journal Pediatrics.
Study shows puzzle games can improve mental flexibility
A recent study by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) scientists showed that adults who played the physics-based puzzle video game Cut the Rope regularly, for as little as an hour a day, had improved executive functions.
The executive functions in your brain are important for making decisions in everyday life when you have to deal with sudden changes in your environment – better known as thinking on your feet. An example would be when the traffic light turns amber and a driver has to decide in an instant if he will be able to brake in time or if it is safer to travel across the junction/intersection.
The video game study by Assistant Professor Michael D. Patterson and his PhD student Mr Adam Oei, tested four different games for the mobile platform, as their previous research had shown that different games trained different skills.
The games varied in their genres, which included a first person shooter (Modern Combat); arcade (Fruit Ninja); real-time strategy (StarFront Collision); and a complex puzzle (Cut the Rope).
NTU undergraduates, who were non-gamers, were then selected to play an hour a day, 5 days a week on their iPhone or iPod Touch. This video game training lasted for 4 weeks, a total of 20 hours.
Prof Patterson said students who played Cut the Rope, showed significant improvement on executive function tasks while no significant improvements were observed in those playing the other three games.
“This finding is important because previously, no video games have demonstrated this type of broad improvement to executive functions, which are important for general intelligence, dealing with new situations and managing multitasking,” said Prof Patterson, an expert in the psychology of video games.
“This indicates that while some games may help to improve mental abilities, not all games give you the same effect. To improve the specific ability you are looking for, you need to play the right game,” added Mr Oei.
The abilities tested in this study included how fast the players can switch tasks (an indicator of mental flexibility); how fast can the players adapt to a new situation instead of relying on the same strategy (the ability to inhibit prepotent or predominant responses); and how well they can focus on information while blocking out distractors or inappropriate responses (also known as the Flanker task in cognitive psychology).
Prof Patterson said the reason Cut the Rope improved executive function in their players was probably due to the game’s unique puzzle design. Strategies which worked for earlier levels would not work in later levels, and regularly forced the players to think creatively and try alternate solutions. This is unlike most other video games which keep the same general mechanics and goals, and just speed up or increase the number of items to keep track of.
After 20 hours of game play, players of Cut the Rope could switch between tasks 33 per cent faster, were 30 per cent faster in adapting to new situations, and 60 per cent better in blocking out distractions and focusing on the tasks at hand than before training.
All three tests were done one week after the 52 students had finished playing their assigned game, to ensure that these were not temporary gains due to motivation or arousal effects.
The study will be published in the academic journal, Computers in Human Behavior, this August, but is available currently online. This is the first study that showed broad transfer to several different executive functions, further providing evidence the video games can be effective in training human cognition.
“This result could have implications in many areas such as educational, occupational and rehabilitative settings,” Prof Patterson said.
“In future, with more studies, we will be able to know what type of games improves specific abilities, and prescribe games that will benefit people aside from just being entertainment.”
In their previous study published last year in PloS One, a top academic journal, Prof Patterson and Mr Oei studied the effects mobile gaming had on 75 NTU undergraduates.
The non-gamers were instructed to play one of the following games: “match three” game Bejeweled, virtual life simulation game The Sims, and action shooter Modern Combat.
The study findings showed that adults who play action games improved their ability to track multiple objects in a short span of time, useful when driving during a busy rush hour; while other games improved the participants’ ability for visual search tasks, useful when picking out an item from a large supermarket.
Moving forward, the Prof Patterson is keen to look at whether there is any improvement from playing such games in experienced adult gamers and how much improvement one can make through playing games.
Biofeedback-based horror game challenges players to deal with fear
While traditional horror video games seek to provide an exciting thrill, Nevermind is a biofeedback-enhanced horror game that has greater ambitions. It requires you to manage your anxiety in alarming scenarios – the more stressed you feel, the harder the game becomes. The aim, says Erin Reynolds, its creator, is for players to learn how to not let their fears get the best of them in nerve-wracking situations and hopefully carry over their gameplay-acquired skills into the real world.
A Garmin cardio chest strap akin to the ones gym-goers use to monitor their workout acts as a sensor, relaying the player’s heart rate information to the game through an ANT+ USB stick. The game calculates the player’s Heart Rate Variability (HRV), measuring the change in the duration between their heartbeats to figure out when their “fight or flight” response has kicked in and adjusts the gameplay accordingly. While Nevermind can’t zero in on specific stressful emotions like frustration or upset, it’s able to detect the intensity of the player’s feelings and gauge how deeply they feel stress at any point during the game.
Instead of having fanged horrors and hordes of zombies jump out from around corners, which might need a learning curve, the game is more subtle in inducing fear and is designed to appeal to non-gamers too. It creates a warped chaotic atmosphere where the creepiness factor is slowly dialed up, with huge screaming heads, blood-spattered doors and thrashing body bags.
Assuming the role of a newly hired Neruroprober at the Neurostalgia Institute, players boldly dive into the troubled minds of traumatized patients who are repressing their most horrific memories. To root out the cause of their suffering, players will need to solve puzzles and be willing to face a host of unimaginable terrors before the patient’s subconscious is ready to release its painful memories.
"This psychological phenomenon is based on how some people cope with severe psychological trauma in real life," Reynolds tells Gizmag. "These are individuals who experienced an event so terrible at some point in their lives that their conscious minds locked all memories of that event away completely. Although the patients can’t recall exactly what, if anything, happened to them, the repressed memories end up festering within their subconscious and create immense challenges in their attempts to live a normal life."
The sensor detects how scared or stressed the player gets as they move through the patient’s subconscious, recovering ten Polaroid photographs that each represent a distressful memory. Once all the photographs have been collected, they’ll have to differentiate the false memories from the five true ones and reconstruct the traumatizing memory. If they start to feel more fear, which the game sets out to trigger, the gameplay becomes perceptibly difficult. While some situations impact players more than others, they are all designed to push the player’s buttons.
For example, in the “car maze” section players follow the guiding sound of a blaring car horn through a twisting cave-like maze of crashed and wrecked cars full of disorienting imagery. As the player’s fear levels rise, the visuals become increasingly distorted until they are barely able to see what’s ahead of them.
"Some players become anxious over the car horn, others over the complexity of the maze, some over the imagery – there are a whole host things in this area that can rile up one’s nerves," says Reynolds. "The player needs to have a good grasp on how to calm down by this point in the game as it’s a nearly impossible challenge to escape the maze while scared or stressed."
In another scenario, the player explores a grotesque kitchen to find an ambiguous writhing mass in an oven and a giant bloodied refrigerator buzzing with flies that offers a puzzle. If the player gets rattled trying to solve the puzzle in this disturbing setting, milk starts flooding the room, pouring in from all over. Sloshing around in the waist-high milk makes it harder to move and the more anxious the player feels, the more milk floods in until it drowns them. If they are able to calm down in time the milk stops pouring in and drains out. If not, they drown and the game pulls them out of the room, returning them to the peaceful surroundings of the Institute until they feel ready again.
Making the game tougher as the player’s fear increases might seem counter-intuitive, but its developers were very clear about designing it that way. “We wanted players to become aware in a very real way of when their anxiety levels were starting to become elevated and reward them for being able to manage that anxiety on the fly,” Reynolds tells us. “We knew making the environment change so significantly that it would impact what the player was doing would get their attention.”
Developed as part of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis project within the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media and Games Division, Nevermind took about a year to build and presently exists as a “proof of concept game.” It has one level with one patient’s subconscious mind connected to a hub area that’s built to support the minds of 10 more patients. A play through takes about an hour. Reynolds plans to get a Kickstarter project going and launch the game with a variety of disturbed patients in late 2014. The team also plans to conduct thorough studies of the game’s impact on players and explore its use in therapy.
Will playing the game have us reacting to freaky situations with a Yoda-like serene gaze? Its developers hope it will help.
“Nevermind draws players in with the promise of a fun, exciting horror game that uses some spiffy new technology, but I hope it ultimately leaves them better equipped to take on the world more bravely and confidently than ever before,” Reynolds tells us. “In a way, it’s the biggest puzzle in the game – how do you solve your gut, knee-jerk reactions to unpleasant scenarios? If you can figure it out in the game, you’ll find success. If you can figure it out in life, you’ll find success there too.”
Researchers Develop At-home 3D Video Game for Stroke Patients
Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center have developed a therapeutic at-home gaming program for stroke patients who experience motor weakness affecting 80 percent of survivors.
Hemiparesis affects 325,000 individuals each year, according to the National Stroke Association. It is defined as weakness or the inability to move one side of the body, and can be debilitating as it impacts everyday functions such as eating, dressing or grabbing objects.
Constraint-induced movement therapy (CI therapy) is an intense treatment recommended for stroke survivors, and improves motor function, as well as the use of impaired upper extremities. However, less than 1 percent of those affected by hemiparesis receives the beneficial therapy.
“Lack of access, transportation and cost are contributing barriers to receiving CI therapy. To address this disparity, our team developed a 3D gaming system to deliver CI therapy to patients in their homes,” said Lynne Gauthier, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation in Ohio State’s College of Medicine.
Gauthier, also principal investigator of the study and a neuroscientist, is collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team comprised of clinicians, computer scientists, an electrical engineer and a biomechanist to design an innovative video game incorporating effective ingredients CI therapy.
For a combined 30 hours over the course of two weeks, the patient-gamer is immersed in a river canyon environment, where he or she receives engaging high repetition motor practice targeting the affected hand and arm. Various game scenarios promote movements that challenge the stroke survivor and are beneficial to recovery. Some examples include: rowing and paddling down a river, swatting away bats inside a cave, grabbing bottles from the water, fishing, avoiding rocks in the rapids, catching parachutes containing supplies and steering to capture treasure chests. Throughout the intensive training schedule, the participant wears a padded mitt on the less affected hand for 10 hours daily, to promote the use of the more affected hand.
To ensure that motor gains made through the game carry over to daily life, the game encourages participants to reflect on their daily use of the weaker arm and engages the gamer in additional problem-solving ways of using the weaker arm for daily activities.
“This novel model of therapy has shown positive results for individuals who have played the game. Gains in motor speed, as measured by the Wolf Motor Function Test, rival those made through traditional CI therapy,” said Gauthier. “It provides intense high quality motor practice for patients, in their own homes. Patients have reported they have more motivation, time goes by quicker and the challenges are exciting and not so tedious.”
Gauthier said that, if this initial trial demonstrates sufficient evidence of efficacy in stroke survivors, future expansion of gaming CI therapy is possible for other patients with traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis.
Researchers Identify Risk-Factors for Addictive Video-Game Use among Adults
New research from the University of Missouri indicates escapism, social interaction and rewards fuel problematic video-game use among “very casual” to “hardcore” adult gamers. Understanding individual motives that contribute to unhealthy game play could help counselors identify and treat individuals addicted to video games.
“The biggest risk factor for pathological video game use seems to be playing games to escape from daily life,” said Joe Hilgard, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. “Individuals who play games to get away from their lives or to pretend to be other people seem to be those most at-risk for becoming part of a vicious cycle. These gamers avoid their problems by playing games, which in turn interferes with their lives because they’re so busy playing games.”
Problematic video game use is more than just excessive use of video games; it also includes a variety of unhealthy behaviors, such as lying to others about how much time is spent playing games and missing work or other obligations to play games.
“People who play games to socialize with other players seem to have more problems as well,” Hilgard said. “It could be that games are imposing a sort of social obligation on these individuals so that they have to set aside time to play with other players. For example, in games like World of Warcraft, most players join teams or guilds. If some teammates want to play for four hours on a Saturday night, the other players feel obligated to play or else they may be cut from the team. Those play obligations can mess with individuals’ real-life obligations.”
Problematic video game use isn’t all that different from other types of addictive behavior, such as alcohol or drug abuse, which can be spurred by poor coping strategies, Hilgard said.
“Gamers who are really into getting to the next level or collecting all of the in-game items seem to have unhealthier video-game use,” Hilgard said. “When people talk about games being ‘so addictive,’ usually they’re referring to games like Farmville or Diablo that give players rewards, such as better equipment or stronger characters, as they play. People who are especially motivated by these rewards can find it hard to stop playing.”
Understanding individuals’ motives for playing video games can inform researchers, game developers and consumers about why certain games attract certain individuals, Hilgard said.
“Researchers have suspected that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are the most addictive genre of video games,” Hilgard said. “Our study provides some evidence that supports that claim. The games provide opportunities for players to advance levels, to join teams and to play with others. In addition, the games provide enormous fantasy worlds that gamers can disappear into for hours at a time and forget about their problems. MMORPGs may be triple threats for encouraging pathological game use because they present all three risk factors to gamers.”
“Consistent with previous research, we did not find a perfect relationship between total time spent playing games and addictive video game behaviors,” said study co-author Christopher Engelhardt, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Health Psychology in the MU School of Health Professions and the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. “Additionally, other variables, such as the proportion of free time spent playing video games, seem to better predict game addiction above and beyond the total amount of time spent playing video games.”
The open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychology, published the article, “Individual differences in motives, preferences, and pathology in video games: the gaming attitudes, motives, and experiences scales (GAMES),” earlier in September.
Playing video games can boost brain power
Certain types of video games can help to train the brain to become more agile and improve strategic thinking, according to scientists from Queen Mary University of London and University College London (UCL).
The researchers recruited 72 volunteers and measured their ‘cognitive flexibility’ described as a person’s ability to adapt and switch between tasks, and think about multiple ideas at a given time to solve problems.
Two groups of volunteers were trained to play different versions of a real-time strategy game called StarCraft, a fast-paced game where players have to construct and organise armies to battle an enemy. A third of the group played a life simulation video game called The Sims, which does not require much memory or many tactics.
All the volunteers played the video games for 40 hours over six to eight weeks, and were subjected to a variety of psychological tests before and after. All the participants happened to be female as the study was unable to recruit a sufficient number of male volunteers who played video games for less than two hours a week.
The researchers discovered that those who played StarCraft were quicker and more accurate in performing cognitive flexibility tasks, than those who played The Sims.
Dr Brian Glass from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, said: “Previous research has demonstrated that action video games, such as Halo, can speed up decision making but the current work finds that real-time strategy games can promote our ability to think on the fly and learn from past mistakes.
“Our paper shows that cognitive flexibility, a cornerstone of human intelligence, is not a static trait but can be trained and improved using fun learning tools like gaming.”
Professor Brad Love from UCL, said: “Cognitive flexibility varies across people and at different ages. For example, a fictional character like Sherlock Holmes has the ability to simultaneously engage in multiple aspects of thought and mentally shift in response to changing goals and environmental conditions.
“Creative problem solving and ‘thinking outside the box’ require cognitive flexibility. Perhaps in contrast to the repetitive nature of work in past centuries, the modern knowledge economy places a premium on cognitive flexibility.”
Dr Glass added: “The volunteers who played the most complex version of the video game performed the best in the post-game psychological tests. We need to understand now what exactly about these games is leading to these changes, and whether these cognitive boosts are permanent or if they dwindle over time. Once we have that understanding, it could become possible to develop clinical interventions for symptoms related to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or traumatic brain injuries, for example.”
(Source: qmul.ac.uk)
Video Gamers Really Do See More
Hours spent at the video gaming console not only train a player’s hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers.
"Gamers see the world differently," said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. "They are able to extract more information from a visual scene."
It can be difficult to find non-gamers among college students these days, but from among a pool of subjects participating in a much larger study in Stephen Mitroff’s Visual Cognition Lab at Duke, the researchers found 125 participants who were either non-gamers or very intensive gamers.
Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot.
At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter.
Earlier research by others has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially one of the “first-person shooters,” a gamer makes “probabilistic inferences” about what he’s seeing — good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right — as rapidly as he can.
Appelbaum said that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. “They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster.”
Both groups experienced a rapid decay in memory of what the letters had been, but the gamers outperformed the non-gamers at every time interval.
The visual system sifts information out from what the eyes are seeing, and data that isn’t used decays quite rapidly, Appelbaum said. Gamers discard the unused stuff just about as fast as everyone else, but they appear to be starting with more information to begin with.
The researchers examined three possible reasons for the gamers’ apparently superior ability to make probabilistic inferences. Either they see better, they retain visual memory longer or they’ve improved their decision-making.
Looking at these results, Applebaum said, it appears that prolonged memory retention isn’t the reason. But the other two factors might both be in play — it is possible that the gamers see more immediately, and they are better able make better correct decisions from the information they have available.
To get at this question, the researchers will need more data from brainwaves and MRI imagery to see where the brains of gamers have been trained to perform differently on visual tasks.
Video games: bad or good for your memory?
After the horrific shooting sprees at Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007, players of violent video games, such as First Person Shooter (FPS) games, have often been accused in the media of being impulsive, antisocial, or aggressive.
Positive effects
However, the question is: do First Person Shooter games also have positive effects for our mental processes? At the University of Leiden, we investigated whether gaming could be a fast and easy way to improve your memory.
Develop an adaptive mindset
Indeed, the new generations of FPS (compared to strategic) games are not just about pressing a button at the right moment but require the players to develop an adaptive mindset to rapidly react and monitor fast moving visual and auditory stimuli.
Gamers compared to non-gamers
In a study published in Psychological Research Journal, Dr. Lorenza Colzato and her fellow researchers compared, on a task related to working memory, people who played at least five hours weekly with people who never played video games.
More flexible brain
The researchers found that gamers outperformed non-gamers. They suggest that video game experience trains your brain to become more flexible in the updating and monitoring of new information enhancing the memory capacity of the gamers.