Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility 124
First time accepted submitter briglass writes "Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids. The control group played The Sims. It's been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility."
Even better (Score:4, Insightful)
Doing anything cognitively challenging would... (Score:5, Insightful)
Games have nothing to do with it. It seems rather self-evident that doing that involves learning something reasonably challenging for an hour a day for two months would boost cognitive flexibility.
Re:cognitive skills increased (Score:2, Insightful)
Fast-paced chess on steroids (Score:2, Insightful)
I doubt anyone who makes such a claim has ever seen high level fast-paced chess.