Non-gamer participants played five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day, five days of the week for one mont<\/strong>h. Each participant was assigned one game. Some played games like Bejeweled where participants matched three identical objects or an agent-based virtual life simulation like The Sims, while others played action games or had to find hidden objects, as in Hidden Expedition.<\/p>\n After this month of ‘training’, the researchers found that people who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time<\/strong>, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks.<\/p>\n Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, the authors state that 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.<\/p>\n They add that video games don’t appear to cause a general improvement in mental abilities<\/strong>. Rather 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Public Library of Science press release via ScienceDaily: Playing video games for an hour each day can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[18,226,227,12,225,237,41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11580"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11714,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11580\/revisions\/11714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"phone](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/cellphone_texting.jpg\")
<\/a>Playing video games for an hour each day can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes to those involved in the game<\/strong>, according to research published March 13 in the open access journal PLOS ONE <\/em>by Adam Chie-Ming Oei and Michael Donald Patterson of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.<\/p>\n