Curr. Biol. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.07.040 (2010)

People who play a lot of action video games are known to perform better in a variety of sensory and perceptual tasks. Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, New York, and her colleagues suggest that this is because such games improve a key aspect of decision-making: the ability to infer quickly the probability that a given answer is correct on the basis of limited evidence.

The researchers asked 11 video-game players and 12 non-players to determine the overall direction of a group of randomly moving dots. In another experiment, the volunteers had to identify with which ear they heard a tone concealed in white noise. In both cases, the players gave accurate answers faster than the non-players. According to the authors, this enhanced 'probabilistic inference' explains why video games, unlike other activities that train for specific tasks, can improve performance in tasks not specifically related to game play.

Furthermore, 50 hours of playing action video games, such as 'shooting' games, improved decision-making in another group of non-players, but a non-action game did not.