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Smartphone games can train the brain - Telegraph
An hour a day on smartphone games can train the brain, like building muscles in the gym, researchers say
They found that playing videogames can enhance particular cognitive skills, with better performance on tasks that use similar mental processes to the brain.
This suggests, for example, that action games can boost spacial awareness while memory games enhance visual search tasks, reports journal PLoS ONE.
Dr Michael Patterson, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, compared it to using weight machines to build up muscles with repetitive actions.
For the research, he asked participants - none of whom were gamers - to play one of five different games on their smartphone, for an hour a day.
The games, which were played for a month, included Bejeweled - where participants matched three identical objects - virtual life simulation like The Sims, action games, or hidden object games, such as Hidden Expedition.
After this 'training', researchers found that those who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks.
Dr Patterson said: "Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, this is the first study that compared multiple video games in a single study and show that different skills can be improved by playing different games."
He said that video game do not appear to cause a general improvement in mental abilities, but, like muscles that can be trained with repetitive actions, repeated use of certain cognitive processes in video games can improve performance on other tasks as well.
Smartphone games can train the brain - Telegraph
An hour a day on smartphone games can train the brain, like building muscles in the gym, researchers say
They found that playing videogames can enhance particular cognitive skills, with better performance on tasks that use similar mental processes to the brain.
This suggests, for example, that action games can boost spacial awareness while memory games enhance visual search tasks, reports journal PLoS ONE.
Dr Michael Patterson, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, compared it to using weight machines to build up muscles with repetitive actions.
For the research, he asked participants - none of whom were gamers - to play one of five different games on their smartphone, for an hour a day.
The games, which were played for a month, included Bejeweled - where participants matched three identical objects - virtual life simulation like The Sims, action games, or hidden object games, such as Hidden Expedition.
After this 'training', researchers found that those who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks.
Dr Patterson said: "Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, this is the first study that compared multiple video games in a single study and show that different skills can be improved by playing different games."
He said that video game do not appear to cause a general improvement in mental abilities, but, like muscles that can be trained with repetitive actions, repeated use of certain cognitive processes in video games can improve performance on other tasks as well.
