Video games may be beneficial to the brain

Video games have been maligned by many as "a mindless activity," but playing them may be good for the brain, says a researcher who is conducting studies on the possible benefits.

The research, being done at McMaster University in Hamilton, involves hooking test subjects up for a brain scan while they are given tests of their working memory - otherwise known as short-term memory.

"We've looked at a series of tasks in which video gamers and non video gamers do these memory tasks," Jim Karle, a psychology graduate student who's running the experiments, said in an interview Thursday. "And we've been trying to determine if there's any major differences between the two groups."

The two groups that were tested didn't differ in their ability to maintain something in memory, such as a 10-digit telephone number.

The differences arose when the information was manipulated and the last four digits were changed to something else, Karle said. "That manipulation is difficult because you have to drop out old numbers and bring in new numbers," he said.

"And we find that video gamers are much more accurate at that task than non video gamers."

Video game players made about eight per cent fewer errors when performing a memory manipulation task, he said, and were about 45 milliseconds faster than non-video game players.