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leighanneslittlehorns
12-19-2009, 11:09 AM
ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2009) — Do your kids want a Wii, a PlayStation or an Xbox 360 this year?

This holiday gift season is packed with popular gaming systems and adrenaline-pumping, sharpshooting games. What's a parent to do? Is there any redeeming value in the hours that teens spend transfixed by these video games?

According to a new study in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors, not only during game play, but in real-life situations as well.

In the study, psychological scientists from the University of Rochester, Matthew Dye, Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier, looked at all of the existing literature on video gaming and found some surprising insights in the data. For example, they found that avid players got faster not only on their game of choice, but on a variety of unrelated laboratory tests of reaction time.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091217183448.htm