-Researchers exploring the implications of videos games are finding that certain action-packed games can help children with attention, multi-tasking, and eyesight.
Daphne Bavilier from the University of Rochester believes that these specific types of games can help attention, multitasking and even eyesight. Speaking to Kate Lamble from TheNakedSceintists, the researcher claims…
“Fast-paced, action-packed shooter games … have been found to help deficits like vision, enhance our attention, and enhance our ability to do mental rotation”
Bavilier highlights that the key is that the game world is unpredictable, and cannot be learned. Mini-games can be too predictable, so the skills learned in mini-games do not help to transfer into mental rotation into real-life situations.
“The key is to have a complex enough worlds where you can make predictions and those predictions are pushed by pacing.”
The research is finding that just by playing video games for 5-hours per week can be of benefit, although there is an acknowledgement that many commercial action-packed video games are not appropriate for children, although the problem-solving and action-pace structures within the games are beneficial. The challenge for developers is to build a model which is appropriate for school children.
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