The hours we dedicate to video games are not as unfruitful as we usually think. Researchers from Duke University (USA) have shown that "videogamers" see the world in a different way, to the point that they are able to extract more information from a visual scene than most of us .

To prove it, Greg Appelbaum and his colleagues submit a series of subjects to visual memory testsin which, for only one tenth of a second, a set of 8 letters arranged in a circular shape appeared on a screen. A few moments later, an arrow pointing to one of the points where there was a letter before was shown. And the participants had to find out what letter had been there before. In all cases, those who spent time each day playing video games had better results when remembering the lyrics that we never played, according to the authors of the work in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics .

The researchers assessed three possible explanations for this superiority in responding correctly. One was that their visual memory stayed longer, something that they discarded in the course of the experiments. The other two options are that video game users see better or are trained to make better decisions based on the information available. To elucidate which explanation is more plausible, they have already announced that they will use images obtained by magnetic resonance to analyze in depth the brain of videogame fans.

Previous studies have shown that videogame fans are faster responding to visual stimuli and able to keep track of more elements than those who do not spend time with video games.

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