3D televisions and gaming systems may be the way of the future, but new research suggests they also may help improve a person’s memory.
Research suggests that your brain is stimulated differently when watching 3-dimensional television or playing video games in 3D, which “can act as a human correlate of environmental enrichment” and “provide meaningful stimulation of the human hippocampus.”
Physical activity and real-life stimulation are important aspects of maintaining a healthy cognitive state, but researchers say 3D video games can help people build their memory without normal physical demands.
“It’s often suggested that an active, engaged lifestyle can be a real factor in stemming cognitive aging. While we can’t all travel the world on vacation, we can do many other things to keep us cognitively engaged and active. Video games may be a nice, viable route,” said study author Dr. Craig Stark.
3D Memory Study
Researchers started their study on a small scale, simply polling self described “video gamers” on their video game habits and putting them through a basic memory test. The results showed that gamers who preferred 3D video games scored higher than those who played 2D games, writing “even in a highly competitive population of video gamers, those who specialize in a spatially complex 3D video game outperformed those who specialize in a 2D video game on this same metric.”
Researchers wanted to to test their findings in a larger-scale study. To do this, they recruited nongamer college students to play either Angry Birds (2D) or Super Mario 3D for 30 minutes a day for two weeks. Students were given a standardized memory test before they started playing and at the conclusion of two weeks. When comparing the tests, researchers uncovered that students who played the 3D games exhibited a 12 percent improvement in their memory test, while the 2D gamers did not exhibit memory improvement. Interestingly, most people experience cognitive memory decline of an average of 12 percent between the ages of 45 and 70, suggesting that 3D games could help mitigate this trend.
Dr. Stark and his team say 3D games help to stimulate the hippocampus and improve memory, but they don’t know exactly whether the extra amount of information to process or the spatial relationship in the extra dimension are causing the stimulation.
“This is one question we’re following up on,” Dr. Stark said.
He concluded that the extra dimension offers a more realistic picture of how our brain comprehends normal everyday life, which can lead to better brain health.
“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,” Dr Stark said in a university statement.