Games and Cognitive Skills

I've posted before about educational computer games, at Math Games Research, about games from Quizlet sets and the related "Purpose Games", and about more idiosyncratic augmented reality games.

Today I see that an Oxford study reports that video-game playing for less than an hour a day is linked with better-adjusted children, study finds; it's better to play than not, but moderation is good. So what can you do with an hour a day? Go back in the literature and see Video game 'exercise' for an hour a day may enhance certain cognitive skills

Non-gamer participants played five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day, five days of the week for one month. Each participant was assigned one game. Some played games like Bejeweled where participants matched three identical objects or an agent-based virtual life simulation like The Sims, while others played action games or had to find hidden objects, as in Hidden Expedition.

After this month of 'training', the researchers found that people who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks. Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, the authors state that this is the first study that compared multiple video games in a single study and show that different skills can be improved by playing different games.

You may be imagining an hour a day spent sitting, and I suppose this can be done on a bus, but actually, I'm imagining an hour a day on a treadmill.

Or then again, maybe not.