I almost fell out of my seat on the Tube the other day as the free paper ‘Metro’ had an article which said nice things about gamers rather than blaming us for the price of petrol and the for the death of Princess Diana.
According to new research, if you play Call Of Duty you are better at ‘making fast, accurate decisions based on evidence extracted from your surroundings’ than non gamers.
Researchers at the University of Rochester tested people who had played fifty hours of games against those who had not. The test involved simple decision making experiments, one of which was to present the test subject with a group of dots and ask them which direction the dots were moving.
The results showed that gamers were able to identify direction both faster and more accurately than non-gamers. However, you have to play first person shooters to increase your skills – strategy and role playing games had little effect.
“Unlike standard learning paradigms, which have a highly specific solution, there is no such specific solution in action video games because situations are rarely, if ever, repeated.
Thus, the only characteristics that can be learned are how to rapidly and accurately learn the statistics on the fly and how to accumulate this evidence more efficiently.”
A layman’s explanation would be that the random elements of shooters help improve your reactions. Enemies in shooters have their own AI and do not follow a set path so each game is different, which means you have to be quick on the draw as you do not know which barrel and bad guy is hiding behind.
Next time your mum/dad/wife/husband complains about you spending hours on Call Of Duty simply reply, “I am not gaming, I am honing my probabilistic inference skills. Be off with you!”
gazzagb
“abut you spending hours” Whats “abut”?! ;P
I saw this in the Metro the other day too, and agree with it, my reaction skills are way faster for one thing.
Awesome lolcat btw.
Sting_HP
abut – def. a Canadian way to say about
pardon me they say it aboot.
Danza Di Fuoco E Ghiaccio
Wow…!! not only do games fast-forward time (depends) they can influence real-life situations.
TSBonyman
Probabilistic? – proba-ballistic surely..
carson321
If that’s a pun, its weak as my brothers tea
TSBonyman
Plausibly correct on both counts although you could stand a fork in my brothers tea. ;)
EntitledToOpinion
What!??
So where’s the part about actual application? Gamers excel at Probabilistic Inference, ultimately, making them better at gamimg!? Or is there not a position that would benefit from having a COD veteran fill it?
“This mechanism may serve as a signature of training regimens that are likely to produce transfer of learning.”
Aaaaay!?
So sometime in the near future, revision will be done by process of some kind of FPS game? Where you shoot your gun by hammering flash card text in a Typing Of The Dead style affair?
Brilliant!!!!!
MrBilly
Only time until someone picks up on your comment “I am not gaming, I am honing my probabilistic inference skills.” and turns it into a facebook fan page.
Dany2Step
working on it
Charmed_Fanatic
Nice simple good news for once :)
kahana95
Out of interest who were they blaming Diana’s death on?