The Quest for the Perfect ExerGame

Could ExerGaming improve your short-term memory capacity? That is an interesting question posed by Paul Pivec in his poster presented at Ed-Media 2008 last week in Vienna. His preliminary results of testing DDR players with short-term memory tests found that expert DDR players tended to have a higher than average short-term memory capacity. Whilst this is only a statistical association and not cause and effect, it is plausible that playing DDR may have helped develop this enhanced capacity.

So how might playing DDR potentially enhance short-term memory? Consider that in order to play DDR at a high level you need to be able to rapidly process the visual arrow cues and translate these into a sequence of moves. The only way that you can achieve a high step rate is by anticipating the moves a number of steps in advance. That’s where the short term memory comes in. It follows that the greater a player’s short-term memory capacity, the higher number of steps they can anticipate in advance.

You might well ask why this work was being presented at an educational conference? Well, since there is some evidence that short-term memory capacity plays a role in learning, then there may be some scope to improve or even enhance the ability to learn by means of training using an “ExerGame” that relies heavily on short-term memory, as in the case of Dance Dance Revolution.