A person playing a first-person shooter video game like Halo or Unreal Tournament must make decisions quickly. That fast-paced decision-making, it turns out, boosts the player’s visual skills but comes at a cost, according to new research: reducing the person’s ability to inhibit impulsive behavior. This reduction in what is called “proactive executive control” appears to be yet another way that violent video games can increase aggressive behavior.

“We believe that any game that requires the same type of rapid responding as in most first-person shooters may produce similar effects on proactive executive control, regardless of ,” says Craig Anderson, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University. “However, this is quite speculative,” he warns. But what is not so speculative is the growing body of research that links —and to a certain extent, total screen time—to attention-related problems and, ultimately, to aggression.

People’s ability to override  is dependent in large part on good executive control capacity, as will be presented at a symposium at the American Psychological Association (APA) annual meting in Honolulu. And  are looking how a variety of factors – including , anger, and alcohol—affect that capability. Two types of  processes play a large role: proactive and reactive. “Proactive cognitive control involves keeping information active in short-term memory for use in later judgments, a kind of task preparation,” Anderson explains. “Reactive control is more of a just-in-time type of decision resolution.”

In three new, unpublished studies, Anderson and colleagues found that playing action  games is associated with better visuospatial attention skills, but also with reduced proactive cognitive control. “These studies are the first to link violent video game play with both beneficial and harmful effects within the same study,” Anderson says.

In one of the studies, Anderson’s team had participants—none of whom were frequent gamers—either play the fast-paced and violent video game Unreal Tournament (2004), the slow-paced game Sims 2, or nothing for 10 sessions, each 50 minutes long over the course of 11 weeks. His team tested the participants’ proactive cognitive control and visual attention before and after the video game playing. They found marked decreases in proactive cognitive control among the action game players versus the Sims players or non-game players. At the same time, there were marked increases in the visual attention skills of action gamers.

via Video games boost visual attention but reduce impulse control.