The next time somebody tells you that you’re wasting your time playing so many hours of Call of Duty or Forza 6, offer them this simple response: “I’m improving my hand-eye coordination.” They’ll probably roll their eyes at you, or worse, laugh hysterically at such a ridiculous statement. Only the statement is not as ridiculous as they think, at least not according to a research that was published in the Psychological Science journal that says that playing action games helps improve “abilities in coordinating incoming visual information with motor control,” or in layman’s terms, hand-eye coordination.
A sharpened version of such a skill goes a long way in improving driving skills and according to a research team lead by University of Hong Kong psychologist Li Li, playing video games allows gamers to hone those skills, thus improving their reaction times and ability to quickly process information with their eyes. The research specifically singled out how exposure to action gaming creates these skills that are necessary for driving.
To get the answers they need, the researchers conducted a series of experiments which required the involvement of 12 action gamers, or those who spent a minimum of five hours per week in the last six months playing games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty and another 12 non-action gamers who preferred slow-evolving games like Sims. All 24 participants were then tasked to steer a virtual vehicle down a straight lane at a speed of 33 miles per hour in the confines of a light proof booth. The experiment revealed that the action games drove more accurately than the non-action gamers.
In a separate experiment, the research team split 16 gamers into two groups, including an action group that was made up of gamers who would play a first-person shooter game (Unreal Tournament 2004) and another group that would play a life simulation game (Sims 2). All players were given 10 hours to play the games and while both groups showed an ability to adapt to the nuances of their respective games and improve their scores, it was only the action group, or those who played Unreal Tournament, that showed marked improvements in hand-eye coordination.
The findings of the experiments were strong enough to convince the authors that action video games have the ability to be “cost-effective training tools to help people improve their essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving.” So again, the next time somebody tells you that you’re spending too much time racing in Forza 6, refer to this published experiment and remind them that you’re simply improving your hand-eye coordination and your real-life driving skills.
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
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