Such a mechanism has been of interest in a variety of learning domains, including perceptual learning and novel shape categorization 7, education 8, and machine learning 9.
One such mechanism, termed “learning to learn” 6, is at play when information or skills gained by experience on one task (or set of tasks) permits individuals to learn new tasks faster. Starting from the seminal studies of Thorndike at the turn of the 20th century 5, a number of distinct mechanisms that may promote broad performance improvements have been suggested. The mechanisms underlying how learning generalizes from trained to untrained contexts is a fundamental issue in the study of learning. For example, the benefits of perceptual training often disappear when minor changes are made to the trained stimulus, such as its orientation or position 2, 3, 4. The broad generalization of skills generated by action video game play stands in contrast to the benefits induced by many conventional lab-based perceptual/cognitive training paradigms, which are often specific to trained features. Together, this work highlights enhanced learning speed for novel tasks as a mechanism through which action video game interventions may broadly improve task performance in the cognitive domain.Ī growing body of research indicates that training on action video games enhances performance, not just on the games themselves, but in a wide range of cognitive tasks (see meta-analyses in ref. We further confirmed the causal effect of action video game play on learning ability in a pre-registered follow-up study that included a larger number of participants, blinding, and measurements of participant expectations. In an initial controlled intervention study, we show that individuals who were trained on action video games subsequently exhibited faster learning in the two cognitive domains that we tested, perception and working memory, as compared to individuals who trained on non-action games. Here we evaluate a possible mechanism by which such breadth of enhancement could be attained: that action game training enhances learning rates in new tasks (i.e., “learning to learn”). Previous work has demonstrated that action video game training produces enhancements in a wide range of cognitive abilities.
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