Video games benefit your brain printmanuscript_finalVG table1_finalVG table2_finalRunning head: HOW VIDEO GAMES BENEFIT YOUR BRAIN How Video Games Benefit Your Brain Jing Feng and Ian Spence University of TorontoAbstract After more than three decades of development, video games are now increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment. These games play a role in fields as diverse as education, cognitive training, physical exercise, and rehabilitation. Developing a good game for meaningful purposes requires a comprehensive understanding of the critical characteristics that trigger the training benefits. In this paper, we present a comparative psychological analysis of the cognitive requirements of several different genres of computer game. We also review the experimental research that has focused on the cognitive and neuropsychological changes that game playing may induce in the brain. We discuss various fields of application for video games with serious purposes and suggest guidelines for designing such games based on psychological theory and experimental research in cognition and perception.How Video Games Benefit Your Brain More than three decades after their introduction, computer games are no longer solely for entertainment. Video games have been used in the classroom as educational tools, in hospitals for clinical treatment and rehabilitation, and in the military for training various skills. Middle school students in the US are using SimCity, a game by Electronic Arts, to design a future metropolis in a national urban planning competition (Future City Competition, 2008); rehabilitation departments in hospitals like Minnesota’s Northwestern Hospital have been using the Nintendo Wii to help their patients achieve physical exercise goals (Drummond, 2008); and the US has developed America’s Army, a first-person shooter (FPS) action game, for recruiting and training soldiers (America’s Army, 2008). The objective of most non-entertainment uses of video games is to change the player’s behavior in some way. The goal may be a simple one— obviously suited to video game training— such as training a pilot to improve accuracy in a landing approach. But the intent may be more subtle, ambitious, and wide-ranging, such as an overall sharpening of visual and attentional skills or the general speeding of reaction times. Indeed, an increasingly sought after goal of meaningful play is nothing less than to improve your brain. Recent pioneering studies (Feng et al., 2007; Green & Bavelier, 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2007) have shown that FPS games can produce beneficial changes in perception, attention, and spatial cognition. However, it is not clear which aspects of the game are instrumental in stimulating these changes. Knowing which game characteristics are responsible for inducing change would be of both scientific and practical interest. Suchknowledge could, for example, guide the development of new meaningful games designed to improve particular cognitive functions. As a preliminary step towards this goal, we review the perceptual and cognitive functions that may be affected by playing video games. Then we present a comparative logical analysis of the characteristics of several different genres of game with respect to their likely ability to modify these cognitive functions. We indicate which perceptual and cognitive functions are associated with particular game characteristics, including sensory processing, visual attention, memory, spatial cognition, and the subsequent planning of motor actions. Our analysis is based on recent experimental results and psychological theory and suggests a future program of experimentation that would test our predictions. A Comparative Analysis of Cognitive Functions Exercised by Video Games Video games exercise a wide range of perceptual and cognitive functions. Some games require a high degree of skill in performing relatively basic perceptual and cognitive tasks whereas others demand higher-level cognitive skills, such as the ability to solve difficult logical problems. Experimental studies have shown that certain genres of game yield greater training benefits than others. For example, Feng et al. (2007) demonstrated that participants who played an action video game for ten hours obtained significant performance improvements on both attentional and spatial tasks, while participants who played a maze game for the same length of time showed no gains. Compared to other genres where positive training effects have also been observed, such as Oregon Trail (for learning history) or Tetris (for enhancing spatial skills), FPS action video games seem to have a unique advantage in improving low-level functions such asspatial selective attention (Feng et al., 2007; Green & Bavelier, 2003) and spatial perceptual resolution (Green & Bavelier, 2007). Since fundamental perceptual and cognitive skills serve as the building blocks for higher level cognition, the ability of action games to improve basic skills has made them attractive candidates for further experimentation. Other genres may produce different cognitive effects and, for purposes of comparison, we also examine two other genres of game. Table 1 lists the salient attributes and requirements of each type of game as well as our estimate of the degree of involvement of the various cognitive functions likely to be active during game play. Our review of relevant psychological functions starts with low-level processes and continues through progressively higher-level cognitive abilities. The emphasis is on visual skills and abilities since most video games are highly visual in nature. ---Insert Table 1 Here--- Sensory processing. When light falls on the retina at the back of the eye, it interacts with around 100 million specialized neurons (rods, cones, and other retinal cells), causing some of them to fire. Much low-level computation is done within the eye itself and intermediate results are transmitted to other areas in the brain via the optic nerve. Further processing takes place along the routes to the visual cortex at the back of the head. However, it is important to note that these routes are not passive one-way streets; lower-level computations are often modified in response to inputs from higher centers in the brain. The early visual system computes elementary functions such as brightness detection,edge detection, orientation detection, segmentation, shape perception, 3D