Can’t believe I didn’t Randomness this one already…

Real-Time Strategy Game Training: Emergence of a Cognitive Flexibility Trait

  • Brian D. Glass, W. Todd Maddox, & Bradley C. Love

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070350

The main finding: increased cognitive flexibility after 40 hours of playing Starcraft.  Of note, the assessment of cognitive flexibility was done by meta-analytic Bayes factor across a wide array of assessments.  That’s very creative and maybe the right way to be approaching measurement of subtle transfer effects.  If the transfer effect is in a process that is partly represented across a variety of measures, you’d need someway of combining the measures and also partially out the target process.  Also of note, the participants were all female because they wanted non-gamers (defined as <2 hours/week) and there weren’t any male non-gamers at UT Austin.