Action video game playing impacts occupational screening for high-stakes professionals

Action video game playing has been linked with enhanced cognitive and perceptual abilities measured via a variety of basic psychological lab tests. However, much less work has examined such relations in the context of measures with direct real-world workplace relevance. Here we examined the performance of male United States military personnel on a psychomotor task battery, part of an official selection test designed to assess aptitude for military aviation. We found that action video game playing was significantly and positively associated with performance on this battery. More specifically, increased action video game experience among Naval Flight Students was linked to both better initial performance as well as more rapid learning within the psychomotor task. In contrast, when examining the same associations in a control group for whom the psychomotor task was not occupationally relevant (i.e., not Naval Flight Students), action video game playing was not reliably associated with psychomotor task learning. Time spent playing recreational video games with mechanics more similar to the screening task, flight simulator games, was not related to psychomotor task learning speed in either group. This pattern suggests that recreational action video game playing may work in concert with explicit occupational training to support effective learning and successful workplace outcomes in high-stakes professions.