"They need less [visual] information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster," said Greg Applebaum, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Duke School of Medicine in North Carolina.
The study, published in the June issue of Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, tested how well 125 non-gamers and intensive gamers could identify letters that flashed up for only a fraction of a second.
In the test, a circle of letters appeared for 0.1 seconds followed by an arrow in the centre of the circle, pointing to where one of the letters had previously been. The study participants were then asked to identify the letter.
The arrow appeared between 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds after the letters flashed up. The gamers outperformed the non-gamers for all time intervals.
Your brain discards a great deal of visual information. For example, even though your nose is in your line of sight, your brain chooses to ignore that information and keeps your vision clear. The study found that gamers and non-gamers had similar abilities in terms of visual memory retention.
However, it could be that gamers are able to detect visual information faster, or simply make better guesses with the little visual information available to them.
Previous studies have also shown that gamers have enhanced visual capabilities. In 2003, researchers at the University of Rochester in New York found that people who play action games were able to track 30 percent more objects than non-gamers. Not all gaming is equal, the study found. Gamers who played non-action games like Tetris saw no benefit.
In a medical robotics study in 2012, young gamers attained similar scores on robotic surgery simulators to trained physicians.
Darpa, the Pentagon's research division, is one of the funders of the research, along with the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Army Research Office.
Why might the US military be interested in the visual capabilities of gamers? No comment.
Source: http://www.wired.co.uk
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