In the study, Yuka Sasaki, associate professor (research) of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University and colleagues pitted nine frequent gamers against a control group of nine people who game rarely if ever.
They participated in a two-day trial of visual task learning.
Subjects were shown an on-screen "texture" of either visual or horizontal lines and had to quickly point out - in a fraction of a second - the one area where an anomalous texture appeared. In visual processing research this is a standard protocol called a "texture discrimination task."
If they move on to a second task too quickly, for example, that could interfere with their learning of the first one.
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Sasaki and co-authors wanted to find out if gamers were better able to overcome this interference, compared to non-gamers. They therefore trained the subjects on a second similar task soon after training them on the first.
The first day the subjects trained on each of the two tasks (in a randomised order). The next day they did each again (and again in a randomised order) so the researchers could assess whether they improved.
To improve, a person had to reduce the milliseconds of time it took to discriminate the textures at a given level of accuracy.
What the researchers found was that gamers managed to improve performance on both tasks, while non-gamers did what was expected: They improved on the second task they trained on, but not on the first. Learning the second task interfered with learning the first.
Non-gamers produced the same average 15 per cent improvement on their second task, but they actually got a bit worse on the first task they learned, by about 5 per cent.
The exact neural mechanisms underlying visual or perceptual learning are not yet known, Sasaki said, but the study suggests that gamers may have a more efficient process for hardwiring their visual task learning than non-gamers.
The study is published in the journal PLoS ONE.