Gamers are better at multitasking than baseline humans. A researcher at Oregon State U is measuring the "switching cost" of going from one task to another, like paying attention to your mobile phone and to the road in front of you. Multitasking gets more expensive the more complex each individual task is. She concludes that gamers have higher proficiency at multitasking, however.
There are individual differences in the costs of multi-tasking, Lien said. In her lab studies, a typical response to a single stimulus might take 300 milliseconds. Adding a second task increases the response to about 800 milliseconds. A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second, so the delay may not seem like much – until you extend the difference to a car driving 60 miles an hour and realize the response rate more than doubles, Lien said.
In her lab studies, she has yet to test any volunteers who are immune to delays in multi-tasking, though she says some students do much better than others.
"I have to say that the best ones are those who play a lot of video games," she pointed out. "Those are lab studies, however, and not driving tests."
(via /.)
