Video gaming can help players hone motor skills for real-life driving

The video gamers out there can finally justify their obsession with it. A new study has revealed that playing action-based video games can help boost the players’ ability to coordinate visual information better, which is an important skill for several real-world behaviors including driving.

The finding also reveals that playing certain types of video games can offer other benefits for specific visual abilities such as sensitivity to contrast and visuospatial attention.

“The research shows that playing easily accessible action video games can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” said lead researcher Li Li, Associate Professor at New York University in Shanghai, China.

The study revealed that experienced action gamers showed much greater precision in keeping to their lane and showed less deviation from a centre in the face of increasing headwinds when compared to the participants with little to no action video game experience.

To establish a link between action video games and driving, in reality, the team recruited participants who had no action video gaming experience to take part in a training study. They then compared the visuomotor abilities of players who had played at least 5 hours per week over the previous 6 months to participants who had negligible action video game experience.

The data showed that playing “Mario Kart,” a fast-paced action video game, improved participants’ visuomotor control skills on the target dot task after five hours of training.

Those who played “Roller Coaster Tycoon”, a non-action strategy game, showed no such improvement over time. For novice drivers, training with driving video games may be more helpful, the researchers suggested in the work published in the journal Psychological Science.