Impact of visuospatial characteristics of video games on improvements in cognitive abilities

The current study aimed to understand the effects of playing video games on navigation skills, spatial cognitive abilities and speed of processing, and to examine the characteristics of games and training hours impacting video game training. Participants were assigned to one of four groups; First Person Shooter (FPS) game training group, Third Person Shooter (TPS) game training group, Control puzzle game training group, and control non-training group. Participants in training groups played the selected games for 30 hours in total. Performances in maze tasks, spatial attention, mental rotation and speed of processing were measured at four time points (pretraining, post-10 hours, 20 hours and 30 hours training) to investigate improvements over the time. The results showed the FPS game playing and not the TPS or puzzle game playing enhanced visual attention ability at both 20° and 30° eccentricity. This result indicates viewpoints of video game are important characteristics which may impact differently on cognitive ability. However, no significant improvement was found in navigation skills, suggesting playing FPS game may not improve dynamic and larger-scaled spatial abilities beyond spatial attention.