The types of video games you play may affect your performance at school, work, or other activities, according to Wheaton College psychology professor Rolf Nelson.
Playing an adrenaline-pumping action game for an hour before doing your homework or tackling a task at work could help you finish the assignment quickly–but with lots of mistakes. Playing a strategy game, on the other hand, will yield more-accurate work, but at the cost of speed, observes Nelson.
In his study, published with co-author Ian Strachan in the journal PERCEPTION, Nelson tested subjects playing either a fast-action video game (Unreal Tournament) or a puzzle-solving video game (Portal).
“While there has been a great deal of [research] focused on performance differences between non-video-game players and avid video-game players, we were interested in looking at the effects of playing different types
of video games,” Nelson says. “Results convincingly demonstrate a priming effect for two different types of video games.”
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