Playing Call of Duty has long-term learning benefits for the brain

One of academia’s most prestigious science journals just gifted video game enthusiasts with this unusually awesome opening paragraph: “Playing action video games substantially improves performance in a range of attentional, perceptual, and cognitive tasks,” writes a research team in the November issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Specifically, the researchers find that playing “action video games,” such as first-person shooters Call of Duty or Unreal Tournament, trains the mind to filter out noise and predict future tasks (or build “perceptual templates,” as the researchers call it).