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Today in class we got to hear Marjorie's lecture on imagination; I'm glad that she takes such a broad view of it. I was inspired to think about my persuasion paper, which has just been sitting somewhere for five months.
Then in the afternoon came practice presentations from K and Jun, who are both studying cognitive processes of attention. K's research is particularly interesting: He's studying the benefits of playing video games! Today he presented an in-press paper (by someone else) that's related to his work, on the technical-sounding topic of "Spatial Resolution," which basically means, how well can you notice things you're not focusing on, if you're playing a game like (his example) Unreal Tournament 2004?
In this study, they first showed that people who are regular players of first-person shooters (FPS) are much better at distinguishing characteristics of things up to 25 degrees away from where they're looking than people who don't play such games. Then, they tested the hypothesis if maybe this just means that people who have this good spatial resolution decide to stick with these games longer than regular people because they're naturally better, by taking a bunch of non-gamers and having half play the FPS game for 30 hours and the other half play Tetris. I would argue that Tetris must improve focus skills too, but apparently not this specific skill, because the FPS people did acquire this skill but the Tetris people did not.
Other research has shown that FPS games (which create a lot of physical arousal due to the motivation of not getting "killed") also increase skills like "field of vision" and "subitizing." Subitizing means that it takes most people no more effort to register that they're seeing 4 of something than that they're seeing 2 of something, but as numbers get bigger than 4 it takes increasing effort because they have to count them; some FPS players can register 5 as well as 4.
Not that there are many non-video-game applications for these particular skills. I was reminded of The Last Starfighter and told K that maybe he should apply for military grants...
Then in the afternoon came practice presentations from K and Jun, who are both studying cognitive processes of attention. K's research is particularly interesting: He's studying the benefits of playing video games! Today he presented an in-press paper (by someone else) that's related to his work, on the technical-sounding topic of "Spatial Resolution," which basically means, how well can you notice things you're not focusing on, if you're playing a game like (his example) Unreal Tournament 2004?
In this study, they first showed that people who are regular players of first-person shooters (FPS) are much better at distinguishing characteristics of things up to 25 degrees away from where they're looking than people who don't play such games. Then, they tested the hypothesis if maybe this just means that people who have this good spatial resolution decide to stick with these games longer than regular people because they're naturally better, by taking a bunch of non-gamers and having half play the FPS game for 30 hours and the other half play Tetris. I would argue that Tetris must improve focus skills too, but apparently not this specific skill, because the FPS people did acquire this skill but the Tetris people did not.
Other research has shown that FPS games (which create a lot of physical arousal due to the motivation of not getting "killed") also increase skills like "field of vision" and "subitizing." Subitizing means that it takes most people no more effort to register that they're seeing 4 of something than that they're seeing 2 of something, but as numbers get bigger than 4 it takes increasing effort because they have to count them; some FPS players can register 5 as well as 4.
Not that there are many non-video-game applications for these particular skills. I was reminded of The Last Starfighter and told K that maybe he should apply for military grants...
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