The Cognitive Advantages to Call of Duty

In the realms of psychology and cognitive science, video games like Call of Duty and Halo have often been associated with a higher variability to violent behavior. If you ask any parent they will probably tell you that they don't enjoy the idea of their children playing video games at all, let alone first-person shooter games like COD. In recent polls about 90% of school-age children play video games but in fact the average age of a video gamer in today's market stands at 33 years old. One month after the release of Call of Duty- Black Ops, Activision the company that created the game, recorded a total of 600 million hours (68,000 years) of gameplay. Clearly, video games take up a huge proportion of how we spend our leisure time. This has allowed current researchers to study the effects of action video games on the brain and the good news is - there are a host of cognitive advantages.

In a 2012 TED Talk, Daphne Bavelier shares her research on the effects of action video game play on the visual and working memory systems of the brain. While non video game players had corrected to normal vision during her study, action video gamers, who played up to 5 and 10 hours per week, had shown improved vision both on a normalized visual scale(something you see at the eye doctor) and in a grey scale visual field. Visual attention is another advantage action video game players show above non-video game players and non-action players, specifically our ability to track objects. We use our visual attention everyday, it's what helps us keep track of cars in an intersection or when we're playing sports. In the experiment, action video game players were better able at keeping track of more moving objects in a visual field than non-action video game players.

In more recent study in 2013, Kara Blacker and Kim Curby found an advantage in visual short term memory in action video game players. Given a memory array, participants were asked to encode shapes within the array and respond as to whether or not the shape within the array changed between displays. Action video gamers were better able to detect the changing stimuli, contributing to higher cognitive functions in visual short term memory. Moreover, a significant finding in their study showed that the length of encoding time did not have an effect on the increased visual short term memory found in action video gamers. This means the action video gamers encoded the visual information on the memory arrays very efficiently.

Often the impact of technology on the brain is seen in a negative light. These studies show that given a moderate amount of action video game playing, there can be significant cognitive advantages from playing video games that impact your everyday working life. So if you're a parent debating on buying your +17(Mature rating) kid that new Call of Duty game for fear that their brain is going to rot everything is going to be okay, they are going to develop significant cognitive advantages from playing moderate amounts.

Blacker, Kara J., and Kim M. Curby. "Enhanced Visual Short-term Memory in Action Video Game Players." Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 75.6 (2013): 1128-136. Web.


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Eli