Common sense has led many to believe that gaming would decrease
someone’s capacity to keep their attention on tasks outside the
game world. The reasoning goes that the constant feed of
interesting stimuli in games would numb gamers out to the slower
pace of day-to-day life. Might there be truth to this? At first
glance, there seems to be. Research has found a link between
gaming (1 hour of more a day) and ADHD, as well as lower school
performance. The researchers hypothesize that games take away
from time that should be spent on school work, as well as
damaging a person’s capacity to focus on a given task. The key
term here is “hypothesize”. Google couldn’t tell me if these
hypotheses have been followed up on. However, Google did tell me
about some interesting research comparing the attentional skills
of gamers with those of non-gamers. Gamers significantly
outperform non-gamers on three tasks testing visual attention.
(References here and here) First off, gamers deal better with
so-called “crowding”. Crowdin