Vision is the dominant sensory modality that people use to interact with the external environment and to learn about it. There is behavioral evidence that even relatively short periods of training with action video games can improve performance on some kinds of visual abilities, especially those that allow people to analyze spatial relationships among objects in the environment. For example, after action video game training, people are able to keep track of more objects moving around in the visual world than they could before. This exploratory research addresses three gaps in current understanding. First, the full range of visual abilities that can be improved by action video game training remains unknown. Second, it is not known whether such training could improve learning speed itself during visual tasks, such as those that involve predicting sequences of spatial locations. Third, little is known about the brain changes that enable such improvements. The proposed research will measure performance and brain activation in a group of participants (using functional magnetic resonance imaging) on a battery of visual tasks before and after a two-week action video game training period. The pattern of performance and brain activation changes will reveal the specific visual and learning abilities and brain networks that are modified by video game training.
The proposed study will provide preliminary data potentially leading to training-based applications that are important for society. Specifically, the visuospatial abilities that can be improved after action video game practice are used in a broad range of professions. For instance, mathematicians, engineers, architects and many other individuals routinely engaged in tasks that require performing complex mental spatial transformations may benefit from action video game training. This research may be eventually lead to developing effective training video games that maximally take advantage of adult brain plasticity. Information about the precise neural bases of these processes may also lead to innovative educational practices that enhance learning abilities themselves, help people with visuospatial learning disabilities, as in attention deficit disorder, or even to future pharmacological methods to improve performance.
