Psychologists from the University of Toronto in Canada said people that play action video games gain new sensorimotor skills faster than people who don't.

Sensorimotor skills require harmonious functioning between eye vision and motor activities.

The new study shows people that regularly play action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed move quickly from being an inexperienced gamer to being an expert.

Like Us on Facebook

They learn faster than others at performing new tasks that require a high degree of coordination without being aware of it.

"We wanted to understand if chronic video game playing has an effect on sensorimotor control, that is, the coordinated function of vision and hand movement," said Davood Gozli, a graduate student from the university.

The research involved 36 individuals: 18 gamers and 18 non-gamers. Both groups were tasked to keep a small cursor in the middle of a square moving repeatedly in a complicated manner.

One group had experience playing first-shooter video games at least 3 times a week while the non-gamers had only little experience.

Each individual sees the target and tries to coordinate hand movements accordingly. The results of the experiment shows that both groups performed well, but gamers performed better than non-gamers.

"This is likely due to the gamers' superior ability in learning a novel sensorimotor pattern, that is, their gaming experience enabled them to learn better than the non-gamers." said Gozli.

According to Piaget's theory, the initial sensorimotor stage begins from birth to the age of two where an infant learns to make sense of the surrounding environment.

TagsSensorimotor Skill, Action Video Games, Call of Duty, University of Toronto, Piaget's Theory, Sensorimotor Stage, Assassin's Creed