Video Gamers See the World Differently

trendspotter points out this research from Duke University: "Hours spent at the video gaming console not only train a player's hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers (abstract). 'Gamers see the world differently,' said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. 'They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.' ... Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot. At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter."

I can believe this

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Mostly because I was a long time gamer before I signed up for a psychology experiment.(This was in the early 90's.) They'd flash a single wordson the monitor and see which ones I could or couldn't read.(I forget what they were testing with the words since it's been so long.) To make a long story short they couldn't use me for the experiment because I could always read the words even if flashed for 1 frame. (1/60th of a second or 15milliseconds) I told the psych professor it was probably because I played so many video games.(Which was the only thing that made sense to me since you have to respond to very quick visual stimuli.) Actually this sucked because I signed up for the experiment in the first place because we had to do a couple hours of participating in experiments for the psych class I was taking and basically I wasted an hour on this and got no credit.

But is it permanent?

[Okian Warrior]

The first few layers of the visual cortex are highly malleable. Wear a set of glasses that flip the world upside down (or angle the field of view by 10 degrees) and the system will adapt within a couple of days - the user will see the world as normal.

But also - when the user stops wearing the glasses the system quickly adapts back.

With all this fluidity, I suspect that a gamer's heightened sense of perception will dissipate if they stop playing games. At a guess this would probably take about 6 weeks.

Re:Must terminate...

[RedDeadThumb]

They should make it so the first post cannot be anonymous.