The Influence of Video Game Training on Cognitive Abilities

Video games have been very popular in the last few decades, but their negative effects have received most of the attention, such as that playing violent video games may increase players’ aggressive behaviors in daily life. Recently, some studies have shown that video games also have positive influence on players’ cognitive abilities, including sensation, perception, attention, space cognition and so on; whereas other studies have suggested that video games do not significantly improve players’ cognitive abilities. This discrepancy might be due to confounding of independent variables. On the other hand, video game training has been developed to take advantage of the positive influence of video games to maximally improve player’s cognitive abilities. So far a few studies have shown that video game training has great influence on people’s attention and spatial abilities. Video game training has been applied in education, military, medical trainings and daily life. However, cautions should be taken to apply video game training to avoid overtraining or player’s overindulgence in fantasy.