full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Daphne Bavelier: Your brain on video games

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability. Okay, we know how to mauesre attention in the lab. I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so. I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to actually play the game with me. I'm going to show you colored words. I want you to shout out the color of the ink. Right? So this is the first example. ["Chair"] oarnge, good. ["Table"] geern. ["Board"] Audience: Red.dhanpe Bavelier: Red. ["Horse"] DB: Yellow. Audience: Yellow. ["Yellow"] DB: Red. Audience: Yellow. ["Blue"] DB: Yellow. Okay, you get my point, right? (Laughter) You're getting better, but it's hard. Why is it hard? Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its cloor. How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the yunog guys here at the top of their game probably, like, did a little better than some of us that are older. What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with pleope that play a lot of atoicn games, they actually rlevsoe the conflict faster. So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems.

Open Cloze

Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability. Okay, we know how to _______ attention in the lab. I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so. I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to actually play the game with me. I'm going to show you colored words. I want you to shout out the color of the ink. Right? So this is the first example. ["Chair"] ______, good. ["Table"] _____. ["Board"] Audience: Red.______ Bavelier: Red. ["Horse"] DB: Yellow. Audience: Yellow. ["Yellow"] DB: Red. Audience: Yellow. ["Blue"] DB: Yellow. Okay, you get my point, right? (Laughter) You're getting better, but it's hard. Why is it hard? Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its _____. How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the _____ guys here at the top of their game probably, like, did a little better than some of us that are older. What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with ______ that play a lot of ______ games, they actually _______ the conflict faster. So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems.

Solution

  1. young
  2. action
  3. color
  4. green
  5. daphne
  6. people
  7. orange
  8. resolve
  9. measure

Original Text

Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability. Okay, we know how to measure attention in the lab. I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so. I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to actually play the game with me. I'm going to show you colored words. I want you to shout out the color of the ink. Right? So this is the first example. ["Chair"] Orange, good. ["Table"] Green. ["Board"] Audience: Red.Daphne Bavelier: Red. ["Horse"] DB: Yellow. Audience: Yellow. ["Yellow"] DB: Red. Audience: Yellow. ["Blue"] DB: Yellow. Okay, you get my point, right? (Laughter) You're getting better, but it's hard. Why is it hard? Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color. How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the young guys here at the top of their game probably, like, did a little better than some of us that are older. What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games, they actually resolve the conflict faster. So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
video games 16
action video 7
video game 6
action games 6
game players 3
mental rotation 3
play video 2
playing video 2
screen time 2
eyesight worse 2
attention problems 2
keeping track 2
bad idea 2
training studies 2
brain scientists 2
good ingredients 2
entertainment software 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
video game players 3
action video game 3
play video games 2
playing video games 2
action video games 2

ngrams of length 4

collocation frequency
action video game players 2

Important Words

  1. action
  2. attention
  3. color
  4. colored
  5. conflict
  6. daphne
  7. determines
  8. distractability
  9. fast
  10. faster
  11. game
  12. games
  13. give
  14. good
  15. greater
  16. green
  17. guys
  18. hard
  19. heard
  20. ink
  21. introduced
  22. kind
  23. lab
  24. laughter
  25. lead
  26. lot
  27. measure
  28. older
  29. orange
  30. participate
  31. people
  32. play
  33. playing
  34. point
  35. problems
  36. red
  37. resolve
  38. shout
  39. show
  40. task
  41. top
  42. video
  43. word
  44. words
  45. yellow
  46. young