Abstract
Video game players outperform non-players on measures of basic attention and performance.
Differences might result from exposure to video games or reflect other group differences.
Research has suggested a causal link between video game experience and improved attentional
skills (e.g., Green & Bavelier, 2003). We sought to replicate and extend these results.
Expert/non-gamer performance was assessed on tasks tapping a wide range of abilities. Non-
gamers played 20+ hours of an action video game, a puzzle game, or a real-time strategy game.
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 between tasks, and mentally rotated objects more efficiently.
Strikingly, extensive video game practice did not substantially enhance performance for non-
gamers on most cognitive tasks (except for a mental rotation task). Our results suggest that at
least some differences between video game experts and non-gamers in basic cognitive
performance result either from far more extensive video game experience or from pre-existing
group differences in abilities that result in a self-selection effect.
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