WASHINGTON, DC — Parents often worry about the harmful impacts of video games on their
children, from mental health and social problems to missing out on exercise.
اضافة اعلان
But a large new
US study published in
JAMA Network Open on Monday indicates there may also be
cognitive benefits associated with the popular pastime.
Lead author Bader
Chaarani, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont,
told AFP he was naturally drawn to the topic as a keen gamer himself with
expertise in neuroimagery.
Prior research
had focused on detrimental effects, linking gaming with depression and
increased aggression.
These studies
were however limited by their relatively small number of participants,
particularly those involving brain imaging, said Charaani.
For the new
research, Chaarani and colleagues analyzed data from the large and ongoing
Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, which is funded by the National
Institutes of Health.
They looked at
survey answers, cognitive test results, and brain images from around 2,000
nine- and ten-year-olds, who were separated into two groups: those who never
played games, and those who played for three hours or more a day.
This threshold
was chosen as it exceeds the
American Academy of Pediatrics screen time
guidelines of one or two hours of video games for older children.
Impulses and memory
Each group was assessed in two tasks.
The first
involved seeing arrows pointing left or right, with the children asked to press
left or right as fast as they could.
They were also
told to not press anything if they saw a “stop” signal, to measure how well
they could control their impulses.
In the second
task, they were shown people’s faces, and then asked if a subsequent picture
shown later on matched or not, in a test of their working memory.
After using
statistical methods to control for variables that could skew results, such as
parental income, IQ, and mental
health symptoms, the team found the video
gamers performed consistently better on both tasks.
As they performed
the tasks, the children’s brains were scanned using functional magnetic
resonance imaging. Video gamers’ brains showed more activity in regions
associated with attention and memory.
“The results
raise the intriguing possibility that video gaming may provide a cognitive
training experience with measurable neurocognitive effects,” the authors
concluded in their paper.
Right now it’s
not possible to know whether better cognitive performance drives more gaming,
or is its result, said Chaarani.
The team hope to
get a more clear answer as the study continues and they look again at the same
children at older ages.
This will also help exclude other potential factors
at play 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
— though at age 10 children tend to favor action games like Fortnite or
Assassin’s Creed.
“Of course,
excessive use of screen time is bad for overall mental health and physical
activity,” said Chaarani.
But he said the
results showed video games might be a better use of screen time than watching
videos on YouTube, which has no discernible cognitive effects.
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