The Science-Backed Reason Why Gamers Could Make Better EntrepreneursA new study found that participants who reported playing hours of games a week were better at a predictive task involving cue cards.
Hardcore gamers have a quality that could make them better entrepreneurs or startup employees.
Several studies have shown that playing video games can help you improve yourreasoning skillsandspeed up your reaction time德国研究人员发现,玩家,现在s may learn faster, too.
Related:Stressed Out? Science Says to Play a Video Game for 5 Minutes.
Researchers Boris Suchan, Sabrina Schenk and Robert Lech at Ruhr-Universität Bochum conducted astudyof 34 volunteers, half of whom self-reported that they played 15 or more hours of video games a week on a computer or console.
The participants were given a predictive task that required them to learn the meanings of cue cards. They were shown a combination of three cards with different symbols, then tasked with guessing whether that combination indicated sun or rain. The researchers provided feedback on their choices immediately, which allowed the participants to learn what the cards meant.
The gamers did better at combining the cards with the weather indicators than the non-gamers.
"Our study shows that gamers are better in analyzing a situation quickly, to generate new knowledge and to categorize facts -- especially in situations with high uncertainties," Schenk said in apress release.
Related:Do These 50 Things Regularly and You'll Become a Better Entrepreneur
While this study's sample size is extremely small, its findings echo those of onedone in 2014and published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.In it, researchers tasked gamers and non-gamers with identifying patterns among fuzzy blotches on a screen amid varying levels of background noise. While both groups performed equally at the start of the task, the gamers learned what they needed to do faster. Even a group of non-gamers who researchers tasked with playing 50 hours of games before the experiment performed better at the task.
但佛罗里达州立大学的心理学家沃尔特•Boot pointed out toPopular Mechanicsthat it's not like games have a magical ability to improve learning skills. It may just be that gamers may be more motivated to win, have better visual abilities and are fast learners to begin with.
Either way, it may be wise to start asking prospective employees how many virtual baddies they've blasted in the past week.
Related:How Playing Video Games Made Me a Better Entrepreneur
