Videogamers are no better at talking while driving

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Videogamers are no better at talking while driving

Posted by: Colleen Stoxen Updated: June 13, 2012 - 12:21 PM

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No matter how much time you've spent training your brain to multitask by playing "Call of Duty," you're probably no better at talking on the phone while driving than anybody else.

A study by the Visual Cognition Laboratory at Duke University wanted to see whether gamers who have spent hours in front of a screen simultaneously watching the map, scanning doorways for bad guys and listening to the chatter of their fellow gamers could answer questions and drive at the same time. The finding: not so much.

"It doesn't matter how much you've trained your brain, we just aren't set up to do this," said Stephen Mitroff, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

Gamers and non-gamers saw similar declines in performance while multi-tasking, researchers found. (Interestingly, it was difficult to find non-gaming men and gaming women on a college campus, said lead author Sarah Donahue.)