"Bang, Bang, KABOOM!"... 5 More Minutes Mom!

The Philippines has become the top leader in the region when it comes to gaming. According to the 2009 statistics coming from the IDC (International Data Corporation), the Philippines would have produced an estimated 7.9 million online gamers by the of that year alone. This number greatly overshadowed the estimates for the other countries in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, 1.08 million; Singapore, 1.47 million; Thailand, 2.88 million; Vietnam, 4.07 million; and Malaysia, 6.11 million. This may seem like bad news to some concerned individuals - especially the mommies, the teachers and the boss people of the country; but there may actually be a silver lining.  

Boys around the country rejoice! The next time your doting mothers or jealous girlfriends (or boyfriends) ask you to stop playing video games and demand that you start paying more attention, you can now proudly cite how video games can actually help you in doing just that.

In a 2010 study by Matthew W.G. Dye and Daphne Bavelier, they tested a [pre-dominantly male; to reflect the bias that gamers are mostly male] group of children (aged 7-17 yrs old) and a [pre-dominantly male] group of adults (aged 18-22 yrs old) on three aspects of visual attention namely, (A; Spatial) the ability to distribute visual attention across the field to search for a target, (B; Temporal) the time required for attention to recover from being directed towards a target, and (C; Object-based) the number of objects to which attention can be simultaneously allocated. The researchers used UFOV, AB and MOT tasks respectively to measure these aspects of attention. The participants were afterwards interviewed to determine their [action] video game playing habits. They looked specifically at the patricipants' frequency of video game playing in the 12 months prior to being tested- how often they played and how long they typically played for every session. 

Initial analysis revealed that there was no improvement with age on the UFOV task suggesting an already stable visual seach skills by the time they the children have entered elementary school. In the attentional blink task (AB), the scores were seen to follow a diminishing asymptote to the middle school years. For the MOT (multiply tracking object) task, age brings improvement in visually following objects. Using these considerations, they focused then focused on comparing video game players and non-video players on the the spatial, temporal and object-based aspects of visual attention.

They found that video- game players scored significantly higher on all three tasks which meant: they required less time for the stimulus to be present to attend to a stimulus in a scene littered with distractors, they had improved peripheral visual attentive performance without a cost to central visual performance, they recovered faster than non-video game players, and they could visually track more objects. 

Well, the results honestly caught me by surprise. Although I consider myself a gamer, I've always been one of those people (together with the mommies, the teachers and the boss people of the country) who firmly believe that too much video games is bad. I guess what we can take away from this is that although it may have somewhat improved effect on our visual capacity, there are still other studies that indicate how action video games lead to increased aggressiveness and poorer academic performance. I guess it's all about how we look at things, just a matter of perspective.

Dye, M., & Bavelier, D. (2010). Differential development of visual attention skills in school-age children. Visual Research, 50, 452-459.  


Photo sources:
memegenerator.net
roosterteeth.com