Dots has emerged as one of the most popular games for iOS devices. The game is currently available for iPhone and was downloaded more than a million times within the first week or so. Now, a study hints that while excessive playing may be harmful, occasionally playing dots can significantly improve your cognitive skills.
Playing Dots all day long can be a problem, of course. It can have an impact on your eye sight, cause the muscles in your shoulders to stiffen and adversely impact your personal and professional life. So it must be treated as a game that is played only occasionally.
For casual gamers of Dots, a study suggests that they may actually benefit from playing it. There are many other similar games that have been around for a while now, for instance ‘Bejeweled.’ Scientists at East Carolina University discerned in a study that such players who indulged in Bejeweled and other similar games for 30-minute periods were able to register an 87 percent improvement in their cognitive response time.
At the same time, such gamers are also able to display an executive functioning which is 215 percent more than a control group. While these results are very encouraging, other studies suggest that when you play a game, the smartness that you acquire can be applied only to that game.
In other words, the cognitive skills that are developed as a result of playing a specific game are useful only for playing that game again – and to put them to use in other situations doesn’t seem to work out.
Courtesy: Salon
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