Video games may help children have better cognitive performance, a new study published in JAMA Network Open suggests after studying thousands of young kids.
The research observed roughly 2,000 children and found that the ones who played video games for three hours or more per day performed better on cognitive skill tests, which include impulse control and working memory, compared to kids who never play video games.
Video Games and Cognitive Performance
The study comes as the general belief is that video games have a negative influence on children's well-being and development despite very little to no actual scientific evidence supporting the claims.
Now, a growing body of more sophisticated modern research is finding that the effects of digital screen time on children are complicated and multifaceted. For instance, a study from 2019 by the University of Oxford, found that screen time in teenagers had little effect on mental well-being.
A follow-up study from the same research team also found that there was a small correlation between playing video games and positive well-being. More recently, a study from a team of European researchers discovered that playing video games could even boost a child's intelligence, as per New Atlas.
The latest study focused particularly on the cognitive and neurobiological impact of playing video games in a big cohort of young children. The researchers looked at data from a large ongoing project known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.
The team surveyed roughly 2,000 children aged nine and 10 years old, with 1,200 participants reported never playing video games while roughly 800 reported playing at least three hours of video games per day.
According to the National Institutes of Health, the ABCD Study is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and other entities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIDA Director Nora Volkow said that the study adds to the agency's growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development.
Benefits of Playing Video Games
She added that numerous studies have already linked video gaming to behavior and mental health problems. However, the latest study suggests that there may also be cognitive benefits associated with screen time, which warrants further investigation.
Despite the number of studies that investigated the relationship between video gaming and cognitive behavior, experts do not fully understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the associations.
There are only a handful of neuroimaging studies that have addressed this topic and the sample sizes for studies have been small, with fewer than 80 participants. For each of the two groups of kids, the researchers evaluated the children's performance on the two tasks.
Bader Chaarani, the lead author of the study, said that the researchers controlled for factors such as sex, age, and socioeconomic status. The team also found that video gamers not only did better on the tests, but they also had more brain activations in regions linked with attention and working memory.
Chaarani, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont, said that the findings were interesting to see. He noted that this was because it is a way to explain why the children who played video games performed better, CNN reported.
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