'Grand Theft Auto' May Improve Decision-Making Skills

The researchers compared action video-gamers and non-gamerswith a series of simple decision-making experiments. (Gamers devoted at leastfive hours weekly in the year before the experiment to playing action videogames, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Halo 2.) They presented volunteers with arraysof dots, asked them to identify which way the dots were moving, and varied thenumber of dots moving in the same direction to make the task easier or harder.
The 11 gamer volunteers were able to make those judgmentsfaster than the 12 non-gamers without sacrificing accuracy, researchers found.They also excelled in an auditory decision-making test in which volunteers werepresented with noises through headphones and asked to figure out whether thesound was heard in their right or their left ear.
These results do not seem due to any particular appeal thesegames have to people with especially sharp vision or an unusual level ofattention to detail, Bavelier said. Non-gamers who were forced to play actionvideo games, such as Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, for 50 hoursgot better at making informed decisions as well.

Odysseus Thecunning wrote:Pffff....reaction time, decision making. Yea right. I wanna see any of those 'trained' gamers making informed decisions and there reacting time when they are face to face with a raging bum hungry Taliban in middle warfare.

10 bucks on the Taliban.