{"id":2270,"date":"2015-11-24T23:57:36","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T04:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=2270"},"modified":"2017-09-06T12:18:10","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T16:18:10","slug":"2270","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2015\/11\/24\/2270\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Video Games Will Help Your Grades\u2026\u2026Maybe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"guy-with-joystick-playing-video-games\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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What comes to mind when you hear the word \u201cgamer\u201d? For non-gamers this term is often accompanied with a negative stigma. For some people, you might envision an average person, someone who studies hard in school or works a nine to five job while enjoying video games in their down time. But for others, many will associate this word with someone who lives in their parent\u2019s basement, lacks social skills, has a diet consisting of Doritos and coke, and hardly sees the light of day. Some people may even think back to the time they saw that YouTube video of a \u201cgamer\u201d freaking out and breaking their TV or keyboard via a rage infused \u201cgronk\u201d spike. If you don’t know what a gronk spike is,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the modern age, because of how large of an influence technology plays in our daily lives, this negative stigma seems to be\u00a0fading as more and more people are playing video games. However, spending hours a day playing is still often viewed as unproductive and wasted time. But what if I were to tell you that playing video games, specifically first person shooter games (FPS), could increase a person\u2019s attentional capacity- the amount of information that a person\u00a0can attend to at any given moment, the processing of peripheral information, and ability to multitask? To start, I\u2019d bet there would be a lot of kids rushing to their parents defending their hours of play video games in hopes of being allowed to spend more time playing. I can envision the conversation now:<\/p>\n

\u201cJimmy it\u2019s time to turn off your Xbox and do your homework!\u201d \u201cBut mom, I\u2019m increasing my attentional capacity and ability to multitask!\u201d<\/p>\n

Attention is a limited resource, meaning there is only so much a person can attend to at once. Specifically, a person must choose where<\/em> to allocate their attentional resources and what<\/em> to attend to. Furthermore, when a person splits their attention between multiple different tasks (multitasking), performance will often decrease as a result of not having enough resources to effectively focus on multiple things at once.<\/p>\n

\"ava\"<\/a>

Screenshot of a first-person shooter game<\/p><\/div>\n

Now, think about all the information that people have to attend to simultaneously\u00a0while playing FPS games, such as: switching weapons, scanning their surroundings for enemies and objects, watching how much ammunition they have left, navigating their way through the virtual map, seeing where their teammates are, and in some instances communicate with their team. FPS games require players to attend to a number of different objects\/stimuli at the same time, while also dealing with several different threats simultaneously. In order to perform well in an FPS game, the player must be aware of every inch of their screen and distinguish between what\u00a0information is relevant and irrelevant; all while reacting to immediate and unexpected threats, such as an enemy, even if it\u2019s in their peripheral field of vision. Because of this, it would make sense for \u201cgamers\u201d to be experts of multitasking, as they are required to give attention to many different things.<\/p>\n

In the study conducted by Chiape et al. (2012), researchers wanted to see if playing video games could effectively increase one’s attentional capacity and ultimately, increase a person\u2019s ability to perform multiple tasks at once; building on previous studies that suggested\u00a0that video games increase the amount of information people can attend to (attention capacity). The study consisted of two groups of people; the first being the control group consisting of people who\u00a0had zero exposure to video games during a 10 week period, while the other group consisted of people\u00a0that were required to play\u00a0at least 5 hours of FPS games a week for the ten-week period. It\u2019s also important to note that both groups had no prior experience with video games (Chiape et al., 2012).<\/p>\n

To properly measure the participant\u2019s ability to multitask, researchers used the computerized Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB), which consists of four different tasks: tracking, fuel management, systems monitoring, and communications (Chiape et al., 2012). Furthermore, these four tasks are divided into two groups: primary tasks, and secondary tasks. \u00a0The MATB effectively tests multitasking performance, as it requires the participant to constantly monitor and act on a number of different information at the same time. In other words, participants must provide attention to all of the tasks at once to perform well.<\/p>\n

\"17rhx3mevumo9jpg-2\"<\/a>

Multi-tasking<\/p><\/div>\n

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To measure whether or not playing video games affected the participant’s ability to multitask, participants took the MATB\u00a0at the beginning of the study and then again at the end of the 10 week period. What researchers found was that at the end of the ten-week period the video game group\u2019s performance on secondary tasks increased significantly, whereas the control group showed no improvement (Chiape et al., 2012).\u00a0What\u2019s interesting though, is that this increased performance on secondary tasks wasn\u2019t accompanied by a decreased performance on primary tasks. Meaning that the video game group was effectively able to multitask without hurting their performance on any one specific task.<\/p>\n

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These results support the researcher\u2019s hypothesis that playing videogames increases a person\u2019s ability to perform multiple tasks at once. Furthermore, this study provides evidence that playing video games can be an effective training exercise to improve a person’s attentional capacity.<\/p>\n

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Now, with this study’s results in mind, think about how many people, whether they be college students or air traffic controllers, could benefit from the ability to increase their performance while performing many tasks at once. For a college student, it may mean getting better grades or just being able to study more efficiently, but for an air traffic controller it could mean avoiding an accident or in the most drastic cases, preventing deaths.<\/p>\n

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Although I don\u2019t recommend replacing study time with playing video games in order to increase your attentional capacity, I find it very interesting and important to acknowledge that video games can have positive effects on our brains and cognitive processes. Studies like these also open up future possibilities of incorporating focused adaptations of video games into learning environments and professional environments as they can provide real world results in increasing cognitive processes with a cheap and highly rewarding platform.<\/p>\n

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The original article\/study can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another article demonstrating the positive effects of video games can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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References:<\/p>\n

Chiappe, D., Conger, M., Liao, J., Caldwell, J., & Vu, K. (2012). Improving Multi-tasking Ability Through Action Videogames. Applied Ergonomics,<\/em> 44<\/em>(2), 278-284.\u00a0doi:10.1016\/j.apergo.2012.08.002<\/p>\n

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Images:<\/p>\n

First Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Multi-tasking<\/a><\/p>\n

First-person Shooter Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  What comes to mind when you hear the word \u201cgamer\u201d? For non-gamers this term is often accompanied with a negative stigma. For some people, you might envision an average person, someone who studies hard in school or works a nine to five job while enjoying video games in their down time. But for others, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5434,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216],"tags":[80225,217221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5434"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2270"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3792,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions\/3792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}