Read enough scientific studies and you might become convinced that everybody should be playing a few hours of Halo or Call of Duty each week to gain a mental edge. Over the past decade, study after study has shown that fast-paced video games bequeath a shocking range of small but measurable cognitive and perceptual benefits to gamers.

"We've seen improvements in tasks like efficiently tracking a large number of objects, accurately rotating an object in your mind, and perceiving slight changes on a display," says Vikranth Bejjanki, a psychologist at Princeton University. "And the big question that sticks out at us now is 'Why?' What are the underlying mechanics that are allowing gamers to get better at such a broad range of tasks?"

Today, in a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bejjanki and his colleagues have claimed to identify the source of these mental upgrades for the first time. "Action video games, to put it simply, seem to enhance your ability to learn how to learn," Bejjanki says.

Playing Video Games… for Science

To test this theory, Bejjanki and his colleagues enlisted a cohort of action video gamers and non-gamers to participate in a "video game study." They then performed a series of experiments designed to measure the participants' abilities to tackle a specific task: identifying the orientation of fuzzy blotches on a screen with varying levels of background noise. (Why this weird task? Because it's a visual test that's difficult at first but gets easier with practice.)

In one experiment, the scientists simply compared avid action video gamers against people who don't play those games. In another, the researchers trained non-gamers—by having them play 50 hours of Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty 2—and then tested how much they improved compared non-gamers who had been trained to play slow-paced strategy games. In a third experiment, the scientists had action gamers and non-action gamers do the blotch test 8 separate times and tracked how they improved with practice.

So how'd the different groups do?

"You might have expected that people who played action video games were better at this task at the outset," Bejjanki says. "But that wasn't the case—both groups were about equal to begin with. Rather, as a function of being exposed to this new task, the action gamers became better at the task. They could more rapidly extract what was needed to do well."

What Bejjanki found particularly exciting was that the participants of their second experiment—those people who trained on 50 hours of simulated killing sprees—markedly improved their ability to learn how to learn. They could more quickly adapt to the blotch orientation task than a group who played 50 hours of mellow strategy games (such as the Sims 2 and Restaurant Empire) instead. This, Bejjanki argues, shows that action video games actually cause a slight improvement in people's abilities to learn how to learn certain tasks.

Contradictory Conclusions

But Walter Boot, a psychologist who studies action video games at Florida State University, says the story is likely more complicated than Bejjanki's study might suggest. Boot points to another recent study, this one in The Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which the authors tested the same theory as Bejjanki's team but came to the exact opposite conclusion. The title of their paper says it all: "Action Video Games Do Not Improve the Speed of Information Processing in Simple Perceptual Tasks."

What should we make of these contradictory conclusions? "It is a hard thing for anybody to really understand. We have conflicting stories coming from different labs," Boot says. Because the two papers can't both be right about action video games, Boot suggests that the differing conclusions may come down to minutia in how the different experiments were set up.

Boot sees a critical fault in the new study (one acknowledged by Bejjanki and his colleagues in their own paper): Bejjanki's team gathered their study participants by overtly letting them know they were going to play video games. As you can imagine, this made it easy to gather participants, but, Boot argues, "it also [likely] clued the participants in on how they were expected to perform in the laboratory." "People are smart," Boot says. "No matter what you do, people will try to figure an experiment out, and deduce what the experimenters are expecting of them—and that can deeply impact the results of a study."

In particular, Boot worries that the experimenters created room for external factors like persistence and motivation to muck up their results. It makes sense: if you come into an experiment as an action gamer, and realize you're being challenged and judged on how well you can play a game, you'll probably play harder than a non-gamer would. Thus, you have more impetus to improve over time.

Boot adds that self-identifying action gamers might be better at learning complicated visual tasks (such as the blotch orientation test) because "it could be that people who have better visual abilities and are fast learners are drawn to fast-paced action games because these are the abilities required to be good at these games," Boot says. So by overtly collecting self-reported action gamers, you could be collecting people who are naturally gifted at quickly learning these tasks, skewing your results into showing a false causality.

In his defense, Bejjanki argues that first, wanting to be perform better at a task does not necessarily mean a study participant will be able to. Second, overt recruitment shouldn't have affected how the non-gamers performed (particularly during their 50-hour training experiment). But Boot adds that, given enough upfront information, the 50-hour training experiment participants certainly could have been motivated by what they perceived was the experimenters' expectations.

It just goes to show you how tricky these questions can be—and how hard it can be to study them.

"I want to emphasize, I'm not saying this research is entirely wrong," Boot says. "Only, your readers should look at it in light of its admitted weaknesses, and keep in mind: this is just one piece of evidence in a much larger assembly of work."

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