A new study suggests that while people who play video games don’t necessarily have better sensorimotor skills than non-gamers, they are significantly faster at learning sensorimotor tasks.
A group of 18 gamers and 18 non-gamers were asked to complete a task that involved keeping a cursor in the centre of a moving target. When the target moved in a complex but predictable pattern, gamers learned to be successful at the task more quickly than non-gamers. However, when the target moved in an unpredictable pattern, neither group fared very well.
The study suggests that video game experience could help in learning sensorimotor tasks, which include everything from typing to performing laparoscopic surgery.
Original research paper published in Human Movement Science on October 12, 2014.
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