A post on Newswise describes a paper published in the latest edition of Perception, an academic journal, where Rolf Nelson, a psychology professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass, discusses the impacts of different types of gaming on cognitive thinking (thanks GamePolitics). In what seems like an expected outcome, action games help you do things quickly, while puzzle games enhance accuracy:

Nelson performed two different experiments in which participants played either a fast-action video game (Unreal Tournament) or a puzzle-solving video game (Portal). Before and after their gaming sessions, participants performed a task in which both speed and accuracy were emphasized. “People who played the action video game did tasks faster, but at the cost of being less accurate,” he says. “Those who played the strategy game did things more accurately, but more slowly.”