A recent study from the University of Toronto found that people who regularly play video games, particularly action titles like ‘Call of Duty’ or ‘Assassin’s Creed’, perform better in sensorimotor tasks and improve hand-eye coordination, than people who do not play video games. The results suggested that playing video games could be eventually become a treatment for people who struggle with hand-eye coordination or sensorimotor skills in general.
The researchers’ objective was to determine if frequent playing could affect and improve sensorimotor control. The study consisted of eighteen gamers who played at least three times per week for two hours in the last six months compared to eighteen people with little to no video game experience (non-gamers). The participants used a computer mouse to track a moving white square. The goal of the task was to keep the cursor inside the white square as it moved in a pattern.
Initially, the gamer group and non-gamer group were having more or less the same level of trouble keeping track of the white square but by the end of the task, the gamers were performing more accurately than the non-gamers. This suggests that playing video games does not give an immediate boost to learning a new skill, but does help individuals learn the new sensorimotor skills faster over the same time period.