It actually reminds me of some studies that Daphne Bavelier and her colleagues, performed at the University of Rochester. They actually trained people to play video games. And what they showed was that after people were trained to play games, their attentional abilities on a wide variety of standard laboratory tasks, including tasks that required some switching between different mental sets or tasks, improved. Video games, I think when you talk about young people today are very popular. And it turned out that some of those results were very specific to particular video games and particular, the ones that are first person shoot them up “Doom” type games. But still, I think that these sorts of experiences may have a training effect that people can learn to become good multi-taskers, if they engage in activities that lend themselves to multitasking.

I probably need to play more first person shooters. This morning I almost fell down the stairs while drinking some OJ.

Link