![Young man enthusiastically playing video games. [Shutterstock - Sanzhar Murzin]](https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/shutterstock_96928031-e1495642256942.jpg "Young man enthusiastically playing video games. [Shutterstock - Sanzhar Murzin]")
Video games can improve people’s driving expertise by sharpening hand-eye coordination and visual motor skills, according to a new study.
The findings, published in the medical journal Psychological Science, reveal that certain action-based video games enhance a player’s capacity to coordinate and comprehend fast approaching visual information.
“Our research shows that playing easily accessible action video games for as little as 5 hours [a week] can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” says Li Li, a University Shanghai researcher, and lead author of the study, according to the Huffington Post.
Researchers studied non-experienced video game users who competed in 10 one-hour sessions of “Mario Kart” or first-person shooter games. After playing the action-based video games, their visuomotor-control, or hand-eye coordination, exhibited definitive improvements.
Novice video game players also participated in non-action video games — ones that require gamers to direct the action for any progress. There was no improvement in visuomotor-control following the studies of the non-action video game players.
First-person shooter games “require players to constantly make predictions about both where and when bullets will most likely hit,” which helps people more accurately foresee “input error signals.”
Yet some still may worry that more violent video games like first and third-person shooters will cause people, especially the youth, to emulate the savagery depicted and controlled within the interface of the game.
Such contentions are claimed to be dubious by Li, who says “there is no solid research evidence supporting the claim that playing (first-person shooter games) leads to violence in real life” according to the Huffington Post. Li cites an article in the Scientific American that contends that “research has failed to show a causal relation between playing violent games and perpetrating violent acts.”
This study shows stronger results.
“The findings support a causal link between action gaming (for as little as 5 hr) and enhancement in visuomotor control, and suggest that action video games can be beneficial training tools for driving,” Li Li explains in the abstract of the study.
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