CALIFORNIA: Playing three-dimensional (3D) video games just 30 minutes a day might mean new memories are less likely to fade away, a United States (U.S.) study suggests.
For two weeks, researchers asked 69 novice gamers to devote a half-hour daily to playing either the two-dimensional “Angry Birds” game, “Super Mario 3D World,” or nothing at all. Based on tests taken at the start and end of the experiment, only the 3D players had memory improvements, the study found.
“The 3D games have a lot going for them that the 2D ones don’t,” study co-author Craig Stark, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine, said by email.
“There’s the issue of perspective, the amount of spatial information in there, the `self’ or `immersive’ aspect of them – you feel like you’re in there – or just the total amount of stuff you can incidentally learn,” Stark added. “When the viewpoint is relatively static, in a 2D game, you don’t get exposed to nearly as many spatial relations.”
To see how the type of game might impact cognition, the researchers recruited people 18 to 22 years old who claimed not to have prior experience with the games and asked them to play in a testing facility each weekday for a total of 10 days.
Before and after the two-week period, the participants took memory tests that engaged the brain’s hippocampus, the region associated with complex learning and memory.
They were given a series of pictures of everyday objects to study. Then, they were shown images of the same objects, new ones and others that differed only slightly from the original items and asked to categorize them.
Recognition of the slightly altered objects requires the hippocampus, Stark said.
The 12 percent improvement seen with the test scores for 3D gamers is roughly the same amount that memory tends to decline between the ages of 45 and 70, the researchers note.
