電玩玩家比起常人較具視覺優勢

Video Gamers Have a Visual Edge over Non-Gamers

電玩玩家比起常人較具視覺優勢

All that time spent slaying (屠殺) aliens and singlehandedly saving the world from melodramatic (戲劇似的) malefactors (罪人、壞人) in video games may give players more than just a dopamine (多巴胺) hit — a new study says it helps the brain’s visual center process (處理) information more quickly, too.

That’s not a new view, by the way: We’ve long heard claims (主張) that action-oriented (動作取向) video games enhance aspects of vision or motor-reflex (運動反射) functions like hand-eye coordination (手眼協調). But in this Duke University-led study, the researchers wanted to narrow the range of possible physiological (生理學) mechanisms that might be gaining an actual advantage. Does playing games induce better visual sensitivity? Enhanced visual memory? Better decision-making? More than one of those? All of them?

Finding the answers involved locating (定位) a sample population of both gamers and non-gamers — easier said than done when you’re studying college students, notes Duke Today. Drawing from a much larger subject group participating in another study, the researchers were able to identify 125 participants who either played games intensively (密集地) or didn’t game at all.

The test, gauging (估計、測量) how the amount of time we see something affects our ability to retain (保留、保持) it in memory, involved flashing (亮出) a circle of eight letters for one-tenth of a second at participants, who then had to wait a brief, variable (益變的、多變的) amount of time before a prompt (即時的) appeared asking them to identify the letter that had been at the indicated (指出) spot on the circle. The results: intensive action gamers beat non-gamers every time, regardless of the delay interval (間隔). At the same time, there was no difference between intensive gamers and non-gamers when measuring the rate of memory decay (衰退) about where the letters had been — the gamers simply captured (捕獲) more information to begin with.

“Gamers see the world differently,” said Greg Appelbaum, a psychiatry (精神病治療) professor at Duke who led the study. “They are able to extract (挖掘) more information from a visual scene.”

So which is it: Seeing better, longer visual memory, or better decision-making skills? Applebaum says the results suggest it’s not better memory, but perhaps some combination of the other two — a question the researchers hope to answer by turning next to MRI brain scans of gamers in action.

*在這裡補充一些和文章相關的資訊：

dopamine　多巴胺

多巴胺是一種用來幫助細胞傳送脈衝的化學物質，為神經傳導物質的一種。這種傳導物質主要負責大腦的情慾，感覺，將興奮及開心的資訊傳遞，也與上癮有關。