"Halo: Reach," the newest installment in the long-running Halo video game saga, comes out today. While players are rampaging around in the digital universe and slaughtering everything in sight, they might be doing something else too: improving their decision-making skills. Action-packed video games, including first-shooters like those in the Halo franchise, can lead people to make better and quicker rapid-fire decision, according to a Current Biologystudy by Daphne Bavelier and colleagues.
“What’s surprising in our study is that action games improved probabilistic inference not just for the act of gaming, but for unrelated and rather dull tasks,” Bavelier says. [Science News]
Bavelier's team first rounded up 11 young men of about 20 years of age who were heavy action gamers, and another dozen who didn't play. The scientists ran them all through a test in which they had to watch dots on a computer screen and indicate quickly, with a ...
