Playing 3D Video Games Can Help Improve Memory, Study Says

Gamers will now have a reason to spend countless hours playing video games as a new study published at the Journal of Neuroscience claims that playing video games helps improve brain function.

According to the study, playing 3D video games can help increase memory performance by 12 percent. It suggests that 3D video games can help maintain the brain's cognitive function even as people age.

In order to arrive at this conclusion, researchers Craig Stark and Dane Clemenson from the Center for Neurobiology, Learning and Memory of the University of California-Irvine (UCI) conducted a study among non-gamer college students.

The participants of the study were tasked to either play the 2D game "Angry Birds" or the 3D game "Super Mario 3D World" for 30 minutes daily in a span of two weeks.

Additionally, the participants of the study underwent a memory test before and after the duration of the gaming period. The said memory test involved showing the students pictures of objects which were identical, new, and/or slightly different and asking them to categorize the shown images.

As mentioned in the report by UCI News, the tests made engage the hippocampus part of the brain which is linked to memory and learning.

Thus, after the duration of the study, the researchers determined that those who played the 3D game improved their memory performance as compared to those who played the 2D game.

"Naive video gamers showed improved mnemonic discrimination ability and improvements on a virtual water maze task. Two control conditions (passive and training in a 2D game, Angry Birds), showed no such improvements," the researchers noted in their study.

According to the UCI News report, the researchers believe that the reason why the 3D game improved the memory of the non-gamer participants was because of the spatial information contained in the 3D game which is much more complex, giving the participants more to explore and learn.

"It's quite possible that by explicitly avoiding a narrow focus on a single ... cognitive domain and by more closely paralleling natural experience, immersive video games may be better suited to provide enriching experiences that translate into functional gains," co-author Stark said.

The researchers are now planning to conduct a study to determine if environmental enrichment, either be it a 3D video game experience or real-life explorations, can help address, if not overturn, the "hippocampal-dependent cognitive deficits" which can be seen in older age group.

As highlighted by Psychology Today, video gaming has been proven to improve a person's attention and vigilance as well as executive functioning.