David Ethan Kennerly has an interesting speculation on his blog. He suggests that "there is an adaptation process that is occuring for FPS players who do not experience" FPS-induced mild motion sickness. As we know from our studies, some participants do experience mild nausea which seems to go away after an hour or two. Ethan Kennerly says "the ability to decouple vestibular and motion feedback might correlate to improvements in mental rotation, since mental rotation necessarily decouples the stable (non-rotating) vestibular state from the rotation task."
This is an interesting speculation and I am not sure what to make of it at the moment. Maybe we should start to track this phenomenon in future training studies and see whether it correlates with improvements in performance. I don't know much about vestibular-visual interactions but there must be a huge literature out there, especially since this has been a big issue in the space program.
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Here's a page with some good background information on vestibular-visual interactions.
As I know, some people have really bad feeling when playing FPS, or other 3D based games that they need to navigate. Some of them even throw up after forcing them to play for a while. And it's not easy for them to just get rid of it by playing FPS games. But I'm pretty sure that by just exposing them with the 3D games, they must have some benefits afterwards. I would say it will be interesting to examine the correlation, but I still think FPS-induced motion sickness is another topic.
If I understand David Ethan Kennerly's point (and I'm not sure that I do), I think he is saying that the adaptation process that gets rid of motion sickness has the effect of decoupling the visual and vestibular inputs, which may lead to an improvement in mental activities that require the mental analog of motion (such as MRT) without the observer actually moving. Previously these inputs were not independent leading to queasiness during the FPS game on the one hand and reduced ability to do MRT on the other.
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