Video Games
It is important to exercise your mind. That is why I try to engage in tasks that improve my attention, memory, and executive control. To be fair I don’t actively try to quantize my activities that way, but recently found out that one of my favorite activities has this exact side effect. That activity: video games.
Researchers at Beckman Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, found that “Expert gamers and non-gamers differed on a number of basic cognitive skills: experts could track objects moving at greater speeds, better detected changes to objects stored in visual short-term memory, switched more quickly from one task to another, and mentally rotated objects more efficiently.” I’m probably not allowed to repost sections of the body of the article, but the abstract sums up the findings nicely.
When I go home I think I’ll have to work on improving my cognitive skills.
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These kinds of results have been trickling out for a while, now. When I was working in a vision science lab, I tried to ask our research participants if they played video games and what kind. We never did a formal study, but the gamers almost always produced the best results. One of the graduate students actually put together a grant proposal that involved buying a bunch of high-end gaming pcs and researching the effects of games on visual task performance. I think it even got funded, but I don’t really know.