Mind Hacks

Hack #43. 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 action 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, the attentional mechanisms that sort and edit visual information can be improved. One activity that requires you to practice lots of the skills involved in visual attention is playing video games.

So, what effect does playing lots of video games have? 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 we’ve talked about elsewhere in this book. The attentional blink [[Hack #39]] 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 (4 and below), the almost instantaneous mechanism we have for telling how many items we can see [[Hack #35]]. 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 ...