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.
"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."
It can be difficult to find non-gamers among college
students these days, but from among a pool of subjects participating in a much
larger study in Stephen Mitroff's Visual Cognition Lab at Duke, the researchers
found 125 participants who were either non-gamers or very intensive gamers.