Parents often worry about the harmful effects video games are having on their children, from mental health and social issues to a lack of exercise.
But a major new US study published in the JAMA Network Open on Monday suggests the popular pastime could also have cognitive benefits.
Lead author Bader Chaarani, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont, told AFP he was naturally drawn to the topic as he himself is an avid gamer with expertise in neuroimaging.
Previous research had focused on adverse effects, linking gaming to depression and increased aggression.
However, these studies are limited by their relatively small number of participants, particularly those involving brain imaging, Charaani said.
For the new research, Chaarani and colleagues analyzed data from the large and ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
They examined survey responses, cognitive test scores and brain images from around 2,000 nine- and 10-year-olds who were divided into two groups: those who never played games and those who played three hours or more a day.
This threshold was chosen because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines of one or two hours of video gaming for older children.
– impulses and memory –
Each group was evaluated in two tasks.
The first consisted of seeing arrows pointing left or right, prompting children to press left or right as quickly as possible.
They were also told not to press anything when they saw a “stop” signal to measure how well they were controlling their impulses.
In the second task, they were shown people’s faces and then asked whether or not a subsequent image shown later matched them to test their working memory.
After using statistical methods to control for variables that might skew the results, such as For example, on parental income, IQ, and mental health symptoms, the team found that video gamers consistently performed better on both tasks.
As they completed the tasks, the children’s brains were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Video gamers’ brains showed more activity in regions associated with attention and memory.
“The results point to the intriguing possibility that video games can provide a cognitive training experience with measurable neurocognitive effects,” the authors concluded in their article.
For now, it’s not possible to know if better cognitive performance translates into more games, or if that’s the result, Chaarani said.
The team hopes to get a clearer answer as the study progresses, and they look at the same children again at older ages.
This will also help rule out other potential factors such as the children’s home environment, exercise and sleep quality.
Future studies could also benefit from knowing what genres of games the children were playing – although by the age of 10 children are more likely to prefer action games like Fortnite or Assassin’s Creed.
“Clearly, excessive use of screen time is bad for overall mental health and physical activity,” Chaarani said.
But he said the results showed that video games may make better use of screen time than watching videos on YouTube, which have no discernible cognitive effects.
