Good news for Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), makers of the most popular game consoles. Playing video games can make people smarter — at least as far as “multitasking” is concerned.

According to a new research paper called “Action Video Game Play Facilitates the Development of Better Perceptual Templates” published in the “Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences”:

Recent advances in the field of learning have identified improvement of perceptual templates as a key mechanism underlying training-induced performance enhancements. Here, using a combination of psychophysics and neural modeling, we demonstrate that this mechanism — improved learning of perceptual templates — is also engaged after action video game play. Habitual action gamers or individuals trained to play action games demonstrate perceptual templates better tuned to the task and stimulus at hand than control groups, a difference shown to emerge as learning proceeds. This work further illustrates the importance of the development of improved perceptual templates as a mechanism mediating training and transfer effects and provides a novel account for the surprisingly broad transfer of performance enhancements noted after action game play.

In other words, people who need to be trained in superior tasking or have those skills enhanced would be well off to spend hours playing “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare,” “Grand Theft Auto V” and “Assassin’s Creed IV.” They are inexpensive training devices, too. Most cost less than $100.

The theories behind the relationship between video games and advanced mental activity are not new. In the journal “Science,” in an article published last year:

Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester and Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison — urge game designers and brain scientists to work together to design new games that train the brain, producing positive effects on behavior, such as decreasing anxiety, sharpening attention and improving empathy. Already, some video games are designed to treat depression and to encourage cancer patients to stick with treatment, the authors note.

So much for the theories that video games are just an empty past time.

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