Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #68. Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games

Some of the constraints on how fast we can task-switch or observe simultaneously aren't fixed. They can be trained by playing first-person-shooter video games.

Our visual processing abilities are by no means hardwired and fixed from birth. There are limits, but the brain's nothing if not plastic. With practice, we can improve the attentional mechanisms that sort and edit visual information. One activity that requires you to practice lots of the skills involved in visual attention is playing video games.

So, what is the effect of playing lots of video games? Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier from the University of Rochester, New York, have researched precisely this question; their results were published in the paper "Action Video Game Modifies Visual Attention,"¹ available online at http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/daphne/visual.html#video.

Two of the effects they looked at are the attentional blink and subitizing. The attentional blink is that half-second recovery time required to spot a second target in a rapid-fire sequence. And subitizing is that alternative to counting for very low numbers (four and below), the almost instantaneous mechanism we have for telling how many items we can see. Training can both increase the subitization limit and shorten the attentional blink, meaning we're able to simultaneously spot more of what we want to spot and do it faster, too.

Shortening the Attentional Blink

Comparing the attentional ...