Video games allow for multitasking? A review of "Improving multi-tasking ability through action videogames"
W ould you believe that playing video games could make you more likely to succeed as a pilot? There's been quite a bit of colloquial evidence on multitasking and task-switching floating around the internet recently, thanks in no small part to work by Ophir et al., (2009) who showed that people who are habitual media-multitaskers (i.e. those annoying people who text while watching a movie or even worse while driving) tend to perform worse on a wide variety of cognitive measures of attention. They concluded that people who are chronic media multitaskers have a "leaky filter", and as such cannot block out irrelevant (and distracting) information. This agrees nicely other theories of attention, and particularly inhibitory theory (Hasher & Zacks, Michael C. Anderson, Gazzaley). One reason that multitasking has come under such scrutiny is that it is now encouraged and even expected in many professions and by many employers. Even in situations where multitasking...