Good news for gamers: playing video games for an hour every day has been found to boost the brain's ability to perform certain cognitive tasks.
Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore recruited 75 men and women who were non-gamers to play five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day.
Randomly assigned to groups, subjects played spatial memory games such as "Bejeweled," hidden object games such as "Hidden Expedition," or action games such as "Modern Combat: Sandstorm."
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After a month of game playing, the researchers found that subjects who played action games boosted their ability to track multiple objects in a short amount of time. Meanwhile, those who played spatial memory and hidden object games improved their performance on visual search tasks.
Their results are published in the open access journal
PLOS One.
Another recent study from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in the US revealed that gaming high school and college students have better hand-eye coordination and control than medical residents when it comes to surgical simulations.
© AFP/Relaxnews 2013