THE relentless march of technology into everyday life has always given rise to debate about whether it is a good or a bad thing. Some believe that the internet and computer software are making humans more stupid or shallow. But others argue that computer programs in the form of video games can make people smarter or improve specific skills, such as spatial awareness. Indeed, an entire industry has emerged to help people “train” or improve their brains.
科技对于日常生活的不断渗透往往引发这样究竟是好还是不好的争论。一些人认为互联网和计算机软件让人变得更愚蠢而且肤浅。但另一些人争辩说像电脑游戏这样的软件会让人变得更聪明,或者会提高人的某种技能,比如空间感受力。而实际上一个新兴的帮助人们“训练”和提高脑力的行业已经诞生了。
Many scientific studies have shown that video games can improve human performance in sensory and perceptual tasks, involving hand-to-eye co-ordination, as well as those that require a lot of attention. But the improvement seems to come only in the task that a game trains you for. This is not surprising. The real question is whether video games are capable of providing more general gains in performance.
许多科学研究表明电脑游戏可以改善人们在执行感觉和知觉任务时的表现,这些任务涉及手和眼之间的协调性,以及高度集中注意力。但这样的改善似乎仅限于游戏所训练到的那些任务。这并不奇怪。真正的问题在于电脑游戏究竟能不能带来具有更广泛意义的改善。
Shawn Green, Alexandre Pouget and Daphne Bavelier, from the University of Rochester, in New York state, set out to find an answer. They recruited a group of video-gamers and compared their reaction skills with a group of non-players. The gamers had all spent at least five hours a week on action games in the previous year.
纽约州罗切斯特大学的肖恩 格林、亚力山大 普杰和达芙妮 巴夫利尔试图找到答案。他们招募了一批游戏玩家,并比较他们与非游戏玩家之间在反应技能上的差异。这些玩家在过去的一年里每周都至少花5个小时在玩动作游戏。
The study, reported in Current Biology, involved a number of experiments. In one, the participants had to watch 12 dots moving randomly on a screen and quickly assess their aggregate direction of movement. Another test asked participants to work out the direction of specific sounds embedded within stereo white noise. In both tests the video-gamers did better. However, the scientists were aware that gamers could have been born with improved abilities to perform such tasks, which were possibly what attracted them to gaming in the first place. Consequently, a third test was necessary to see if these abilities could have been learnt.
这份发表在《生物学现状》杂志上的研究涉及多项实验。在其中一项实验里,参与者必须观察屏幕上12个随机移动的点,而后迅速判断它们总体的移动方向。另一项测试要求参与者在白噪音的背景里辨认出某种特定声音的传播方向。在这两项测试中,游戏玩家都做得更出色。然而科学家们意识到这些玩家们可能天生就更善于从事这样的任务,也或许正是起初吸引他们开始玩电脑游戏的原因。于是就需要第3项测试来确定这些能力是否是经过训练获得的。
The non-gaming volunteers were put through 50 hours of video-game training. For some this involved playing fast-action shoot-’em-up games such as “Call of Duty 2” and “Unreal Tournament”, but others were given a slow-moving life-strategy game, “The Sims 2”. The researchers found that those trained with action games raised their performance to the level of the experienced gamers. Moreover, they were more efficient in their use of visual or auditory evidence than those playing with the Sims. The action gamers were up to 25% faster at coming to a conclusion and they answered just as many questions correctly.
随后那些非玩家志愿者接受了50个小时的电脑游戏训练。其中一些人要玩像《使命召唤2》和《虚幻竞技场》这样的快速射击游戏,而另一些人玩的是慢速的生活策略游戏,比如《虚拟人生2》。研究人员发现玩动作游戏的非玩家的反应能力提高到了资深玩家的水平。此外,相比那些玩《虚拟人生》的人,他们能更有效地利用视觉和听觉证据。在正确地回答同样多的问题的同时,动作游戏玩家给出答案的速度最多会快25%。
The researchers conclude that video-games players develop an enhanced sensitivity to what is going on around them and that this may help with activities such as multitasking, driving, reading small print, navigation and keeping track of friends or children in a crowd. The precise neural mechanism for this effect, however, is still unknown.
研究人员最后的结论是游戏玩家对于周遭事物形成了更高的敏感性,这可以帮助他们同时做好几件事情,也可以在他们驾驶、阅读小字体文本、辨认方向和在人群中寻找朋友和孩子时有所帮助。不过导致这种效用的具体的神经机制还不清楚。
What is known is that people make decisions based on probabilities that are constantly being calculated and refined in their heads—something called “probabilistic inference”. The brain collects small pieces of information, eventually gathering enough to make an accurate decision. When driving a car, for example, many probabilities will be collated to make decisions such as whether or not to brake. The more efficient someone is at collecting visual and auditory information, the faster he can reach the threshold needed to make a decision.
而已知的是,人们是通过在脑中不断地计算和修正概率来做出决定的,这被叫做“概率推理”。大脑收集各种微小的信息,最后这些信息积累到足够用来做出准确的决定。比如在开车时,需要考量各种可能性来做出诸如是否刹车这样的决定。一个人收集视觉和听觉信息的效率越高,他就能越快地到达作出决定所需的信息量的阈值。
One implication of this work is that reaction times in the population will probably improve with the rise of fast-action video-games. There are a lot of players: last year a report estimated that 67% of American households contained at least one video-gamer. And if video-gamers are really better equipped to make quick decisions, they might also turn out to be better drivers and end up in fewer accidents. However, the notion that gamers acquire some minor physical skills may not pacify concerned parents. What, after all, of the skills they are not acquiring when shooting virtual cops instead of reading or talking?
这个研究带来的一个启示是人们的反应时间会随着快速动作游戏的推广而普遍缩短。这些游戏有大量的玩家:去年的一份报告称67%的美国家庭至少拥有一位电脑游戏玩家。而如果游戏玩家真的能更快地做出决定,那么他们就会是更好的司机,于是交通事故就会更少。不过在知道了游戏玩家们能够改善一些运动技能之后,父母们的担心并没有减少。在玩家们占用了阅读和谈话的时间来射击虚拟的警察时,他们所没有获得的技能又是什么呢?
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