Video games aren’t just for fun. Playing them can also improve learning capabilities, reported an October 2014 study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Prior research by our group and others has shown that action gamers excel at many tasks. In this new study, we show they excel because they are better learners,” said Daphne Bavelier, a research professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, in a prepared statement. “And they become better learners by playing the fast-paced action games.”
The researchers found that gamers outperformed nongamers on a number of tasks. That’s because video games help our brains predict what’s likely to come next. “In order to sharpen its prediction skills, our brains constantly build models, or ‘templates,’ of the world,” Bavelier explained. “The better the template, the better the performance. And now we know playing action video games actually fosters better templates.”
Source: University of Rochester