Do Gamers Really Make Better Drivers?

Video games are often thought of as juvenile and even deviant behaviour; but can they in fact have a positive impact on your decision making and even your driving ability?

It is no question that driving requires making at times very quick decisions to emergent phenomena on the road, whether a pedestrian jumping in front of you, a cyclist veering from the bike lane into yours, or a detour that requires split-second adjustments while flying down the 401. In a study by the University of Rochester, cognitive scientists have discovered that playing action video games trains people to make decisions faster. As the report states, "The researchers found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this benefit doesn't just make them better at playing video games, but improves a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities like multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town." 

According to the popular book, Blink, by notorious pop-culture author Malcolm Gladwell, spontaneous decisions (what he calls "Thin-slicing") are often better than those wrought from careful planning and deliberation.  If this is the case, then those who play action video games, linking up the Rochester study, are better at making those blink decisions described by Gladwell as the most wise. 

But the Rochester study is not the only one on the positive impact of action video games on the ability to make faster decisions. The cognitive scientist, Daphne Bavelier, has done extensive research on the cognitive benefits of action video games, particularly on decision-making and multi-tasking. Her Bavelier Lab has put out this synopsis of its research: 

"We have recently shown that playing first person point of view action video games affects several aspects of perception, attention, and cognition."

Daphne Bavelier TEDx: Your Brain On Video Games

The report from the Bavelier Lab states that action video games create and enhance the following skills:

• low-level vision (enhanced contrast sensitivity function);
• various aspects of attention (ability to monitor several objects at once, to search through a cluttered scene, to detect an event of interest in fast-forwarding video);
• more cognitive tasks (multi-tasking, task-switching); and
•  a general speeding during decision making. 

Bavelier claims that the average age of video games is 33 years old, and not 8-10 years old as popular perception might have it. She also foresees, according to her research, that seniors will make up the majority of gamers of the future. Why not? If it improves one's cognitive-motor skills, including those needed behind the wheel of an automobile, then more power to them.