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BLOG: Video gaming may be good for your brain
As someone who enjoys video games myself, I’ve always been a little skeptical of the conventional wisdom that playing video games has only negative cognitive and behavioral effects.
To better evaluate the effects of gaming on cognition and brain activity, my colleagues and I studied a subset of participants from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, a long-term study of brain development and child health in which about 20,000 children from across the U.S. undergo brain imaging every 2 years through early adulthood.
Focusing on baseline data from 1,217 children aged 9 to 10 years, we compared brain imaging and cognitive performance on two tests of working memory and response inhibition in children who played at least 21 hours per week of video games (VG group) to those who played no video games (nonvideo gamers [NVG group]). All children underwent functional MRI (fMRI) testing while engaged in the two cognitive tasks.
What we found may be surprising to any parent who has yelled at their children to get off the gaming system: The gamers outperformed the non-gamers in both cognitive tasks. The VG group had faster reaction times, indicating greater attention and control, than their NVG peers and they demonstrated less activation in the visual cortex on fMRI testing of blood oxygen level-dependent signals, which are a proxy for oxygen consumption in the brain.
This indicates that the visual cortex was more efficient and required less power to perform the same tasks in the VG group compared with children who never played video games. A gamer needs to be aware of multiple visual stimuli at once and pay close attention to and quickly react to movement to succeed at fast-paced action games, so it makes sense that lots of practice at processing all those visual elements seems to make the visual system more efficient.
The cognitive effects remained when we controlled for video watching, suggesting that the changes in brain activation we saw in the VG group are associated with active engagement with the video content, not merely passively watching television or YouTube videos. We also found that the observed effects held true for both sexes: That is, female VGs outperformed female NVGs, even though there were fewer female than male VGs in the study.
The children self-reported the amount of time they spent on video gaming and other screen-time activities. While self-reporting is prone to error in any study population, children tend to be more honest than adults, and there is evidence that children’s self-reports of screen time are more accurate than their parents’ reports.
Our study confirms the findings of smaller studies that had previously shown VGs are less susceptible to distracted attention. Does this mean that children should start gaming to improve their brains? Not at all. We still see higher mental health symptom scores among VGs than NVGs. And we don’t know yet whether the neuroimaging results translate into real-life outcomes. That is, do better working memory and more efficient visual processing lead to better grades or quality-of-life outcomes? We don’t know. To reach any conclusions on real-world effects, we need more data points as we track this cohort of children through early adulthood.
Given the choice, physical activity should always be considered better than screen time of any sort for overall mental and physical health. But our study does suggest that video gaming — unlike other forms of screen time — is not necessarily bad for cognition.
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Bader Chaarani, PhD, has a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering and medical image processing in neurodegenerative diseases. He is assistant professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington, where he serves as a member of the IMAGEN consortium and co-investigator in the ABCD study, the largest neuroimaging and behavioral longitudinal study conducted in Europe and the U.S. His research involves examining the structural and functional neural correlates for psychiatric diseases, video gaming and youth substance use, as well as the application of machine-learning techniques to large data sets.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation Association unless otherwise noted. This blog is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for the professional medical advice of a physician. NORA does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, physicians, products or procedures. For more on our website and online content, click here.
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