MotherBoard – Roisin Kiberd
“Long-term focus erodes with increased digital consumption, social media usage, and tech savviness….” A study released by Microsoft last month spelled doom for the average tech user’s brain, with news headlines alighting on how we now have “an attention span less than that of a goldfish”.
Drawing on a survey of over 2,000 Canadians, Microsoft warned of the rise of “addictive technology behaviours” such as reaching for your phone when bored or right before you go to sleep, or watching episodes of TV shows back-to-back. Researchers reported a decline in the average attention span from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013 (a goldfish has nine, as reported by a site called Statistic Brain cited in the report, though they did not detail how many tech-savvy goldfish were surveyed).
Reader, are you still paying attention? To have glazed over by now would be excusable, because we’ve heard all this before. It’s the latest in our long, repetitious cultural history of tech scares: This same study comes along every few years, our attention spans forever in peril thanks to an increased use of social media, the internet, or simply too much “screen time.”
And the greatest infamy of all is reserved for video games. They are worse than TV, making children inattentive and antisocial and violent and obese. Games, it is warned, rewire society in ways which could be “almost as important as climate change”.
Image: F. A. Alba/Shutterstock
“I think there’s a long history of people being afraid of how technology will affect our brain and behavior,” said C. Shawn Green, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, who I speak to over email. But his area of study focuses on games for cognitive benefit—could it be that the games our mothers (and the Daily Mail) warned us against have been good for us all along? Green thinks so: “It’s basically true by definition that games have been improving brain function. How else would you get better at the games?”
Though it rarely gets as many headlines, there is a school of scientific thought which weighs in favour of gaming, and technology in general, as beneficial to cognitive ability. Games have been shown to increase mental processing speeds and toimprove the cognitive abilities of the elderly. Gaming skills have been foundcorrelational to surgeons’ skill at small-scale operations. Green’s name surfaces again and again in papers on “action game video game training for cognitive enhancement”and “learning, attentional control and action video games”.
“There are numerous well-documented benefits of playing action video games,” Green explained, “that span the gamut of human cognition—from very low-level vision, e.g. your ability to detect minute changes in the level of grey of an object, to selective attention, e.g. your ability to pick a target out amongst distractors, to high-level executive processes like the ability to multi-task or switch fluently between tasks.”
It’s worth noting that Green is talking about “action” games, rather than games designed specifically for “brain-training,” which so frequently fall flat (I have not found one of his papers which so much as mentions Sudoku).
“It’s basically true by definition that games have been improving brain function. How else would you get better at the games?”
The big budget shoot-em-ups could actually be the most beneficial. “I think the education/brain games are still in the early stages,” said Green. “I don’t think we know all the critical ingredients just yet. Right now, many of the brain trainers are just slightly dressed up versions of the psychological tests that we use to assess cognitive function, which I’m not sure is the best tactic—it’d be sort of like trying to improve your football performance by just repeatedly doing all of the drills they do at the NFL combined…”
I asked Green for examples of the games he’s talking about, and he listed the Halo,Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Grand Theft Auto franchises.
He referred me to Ian Spence and Jing Feng’s paper on “Video Games and Spatial Cognition”, which features a chart for defining beneficial game types. Characteristics present in action games include “abrupt onset events”, the need to “discriminate/select significant objects”, “multitasking”, “tracking multiple objects” and the need to take note of “peripheral events”.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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