It was a rumor circulating through medical schools: The video game generation will be better at surgery. Luckily for researchers, it’s also a testable hypothesis that has led them to find laparoscopic surgeons who play video games are indeed significantly better at advanced surgical tasks.

Laparoscopic surgery consists of surgeons inserting a tiny camera into a small incision – up to one-half inch – in the patient and viewing a magnified image from the camera on a monitor. The surgeon uses this image to see what he or she is doing inside the patient’s body while performing surgical tasks.

According to a study published in the February issue of the Archives of Surgery, researchers found laparoscopic surgeons who had played video games for at least three hours a week in the past were 27 percent faster with 37 percent fewer errors than surgeons who had not played video games in the past.

Douglas Gentile, assistant professor of psychology and co-author of the study said, “The fact that they were both faster and more accurate is a surprising result, because in surgery, speed and errors don’t usually go together that way.”

That wasn’t the only surprising result Gentile and his colleagues found – the top predictors for advanced surgical skill were how much surgeons played video games in the past and how well they played them now. These were better predictors than how many years of training the surgeons had or how many surgeries they had actually performed.

“It makes sense that if you’re having to hunt for things on the computer screen in a video game, you’d also be able to do that well in surgery,” said Ashley McPherson, senior in political science.

Kevin Hanigan, senior in psychology, sees the study as helping to break the stereotype of gamers.

“I think the study expands on the fact that gamers are not just people who sit at home on their couches – that they can go out and do things such as surgery and become surgeons,” he said.

Although video game-playing surgeons might generally have greater surgical skill than their nongaming counterparts, Gentile said they cannot be certain video games are the cause, an idea that Eric Cooper, associate professor of psychology, agrees with.

“The problem with correlational research of this sort is you don’t know whether it’s good hand-eye coordination that’s causing both doctors to play a lot of video games and be good at surgery, or if it’s playing the video games that gave them the good hand-eye coordination,” Cooper said. “It’s impossible to say whether it was actually the video games that were responsible for the better surgical skills.”

Gentile said if in fact the relationship is causal and video games really do improve your surgical skills, it’s still not the same thing as being a good surgeon.

“It certainly doesn’t say anything about your decision-making skills, or your bedside manner or several other important parts of surgery,” he said.

Gentile also believes video games are able to revolutionize the way surgical training is performed. He said the current model for surgical training is outdated, comprised of a “see one, do one, teach one” approach where surgeons learn by observing and performing surgeries.

“One problem with that model is that all of our bodies are actually really different from each other,” Gentile said.

“With video games, we could scan in a hundred different cadavers. We could have surgeons practicing on their PlayStation 3 all these different combinations of complications and errors and body types and ways to do the surgery, all before they ever see a patient.”

Gentile embraces the option of innovative training, and thinks that a kind of virtual surgery could be beneficial.

“We could do a lot better than ‘see one, do one, teach one,’ and video games could get us there,” Gentile said.