Do Video Games Improve Reaction Time?
Gamers often score well on reaction tests, and it's tempting to conclude that games made them fast. Maybe. But there's an obvious alternative: people with quick reflexes might simply enjoy fast games more, and stick with them. Untangling those two explanations has kept researchers busy for over twenty years, and they still don't fully agree.
The study that started it
In 2003 Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier published a short paper in Nature that got a lot of attention. Regular players of action games beat non-players on several tests of visual attention. That alone proved little, for the reason above. So they did something more convincing: they took people who didn't play games and trained one group on an action shooter and another on Tetris for about ten hours. The action group improved more.
Later work from the same lab, summarised by Matthew Dye, Green and Bavelier in 2009, looked at speed directly. Action gamers responded faster across a range of tasks, and they didn't pay for it with more mistakes. That last part matters. Anyone can get faster by being careless; getting faster without getting sloppier is the interesting result.
What the big reviews found
Single studies can mislead, so in 2018 Benoit Bediou and colleagues pooled the research published between 2000 and 2015. Two numbers from that review are worth knowing:
- Comparing habitual action gamers with non-gamers, the gamers came out ahead by about half a standard deviation on average. That's a noticeable but not enormous difference.
- In training studies, where non-gamers were assigned to play, the effect shrank to about a third of a standard deviation. Smaller, but it's the better evidence that games cause at least some of the difference.
The clearest gains were in attention and spatial skills. Perception showed encouraging signs too. The review's authors also stressed that genre matters: the control groups in those training studies played other commercial games, and those didn't produce the same benefits.
The skeptics have a point
The same journal, in the same year, published a meta-analysis that reached a much cooler conclusion. Giovanni Sala and his colleagues argued that once you account for weaker study designs and small samples, the evidence that game training improves general cognitive ability largely disappears.
Both teams were looking at overlapping research and came away with different answers, which tells you something about how hard the question is. A fair summary is that experienced action gamers really are quicker on many lab tasks, that playing probably causes some of that, and that nobody should expect a few weekends of gaming to make them faster at everything.
If you want to get faster at this test
The most reliable way to improve at a task is to practise that task, and reaction tests are no exception. Most people improve over their first handful of games and then level off, which is mostly learning the rhythm of the test and settling into it. After that, the gains come from the boring stuff covered in what affects reaction time: sleep, a responsive screen and mouse, and not being distracted.
Action games might give you a small edge on top. They won't hurt, and they're more fun than staring at a dot. Just don't expect them to do the work that a good night's sleep does better.
Sources
- Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534–537.
- Dye, M. W. G., Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2009). Increasing speed of processing with action video games. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(6), 321–326.
- Bediou, B., Adams, D. M., Mayer, R. E., Tipton, E., Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2018). Meta-analysis of action video game impact on perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills. Psychological Bulletin, 144(1), 77–110.
- Sala, G., Tatlidil, K. S., & Gobet, F. (2018). Video game training does not enhance cognitive ability: A comprehensive meta-analytic investigation. Psychological Bulletin, 144(2), 111–139.