Cognitive Benefits

• The kids who play today’s “complex” video games learn to understand and manipulate highly complicated systems. Game players get good at taking in information from many sources, pulling together data from many places into a coherent picture of the world, and making decisions quickly. Such efforts may even slow the cognitive aging process in older people. Gamers may have faster visual reaction times, enhanced visuomotor coordination, and heightened ability to visualize spatial arrangements. They may be better at rotating an object in their minds, and may distinguish more deftly between the trajectories of moving objects. Players might also have an edge when paying attention to several objects at once. Surgeons who played video games for at least three hours a week were 27% faster and made 37% fewer mistakes.

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