Gamers are as good as bilinguals at solving mental problems

By Cory Doctorow at 8:31 am Sunday, Feb 12

Video gamers may have the same mental agility as bilingual people -- an ability to swap out one task and bring another online quickly, which is useful in multitasking and is linked to lifelong mental acuity. A study at Toronto's York University showed that gamers performed like bilinguals in hard mental tests, and that bilingual gamers were even better.

The theory is that gamers are good at filtering irrelevancies out of their decision-making process, a capacity for "see-sawing" activity through different parts of their brains, something seen in bilinguals as well.

"The people who were video game players were better and faster performers," said psychologist Ellen Bialystok, a research professor at York University. "Those who were bilingual and video game addicts scored best -- particularly at the most difficult tasks."

The York study, which tested subjects' responses to various misleading visual cues, is to be published next month in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. Three other studies published in the past two years have also concluded that action video games can lead to mental gains involving visual skills and short-term memory.

Link (via Steven Johnson)