The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recently released a study entitled Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children that was published in JAMA Network Open on October 24. The study involved 2,217 children aged 9 to 10 and showed that kids who play video games for 3 hours or more a day have a higher cognitive performance than those who don’t play video games at all. The children studied came from 21 different states to ensure there was appropriate geographical variation.
There were many tests that methods used which are located in the study’s Supplemental Methods to test the kids to figure out how quickly and accurately they could think. One example of this is a stop signal test in which the kids had to press a left or right button indicated by an arrow on the screen as quickly as possible. If the arrow was accompanied by an arrow pointing upward then they were to not respond at all. This is a stop-and-go form of testing. Those who played video games were able to score at .8 milliseconds faster in their reaction time than the children who didn’t.
There was another test that consisted of studying brain activity. It showed that gamers had more brain activity happening when the stop-and-go testing method in the stop signal test was presented. This made it easier for kids who played video games to know when they should hit the button and when they needed to stop and not hit the button.
The conclusion of the study found, “video gaming being associated with better performance on cognitive tests that involve response inhibition and working memory and altered BOLD [blood-oxygen-level-dependent] signal on these tasks.” According to the researchers, this means that video games might give kids cognitive training that has actual beneficial neurocognitive effects.
Researchers believe that this will open a door for their peers to look into what the long-term effects of playing video games might be. This is further touched upon in the study as they cite another paper entitled “Video Game Training Enhances Visuospatial Working Memory” that’s on Frontier and further enhances the theory, this time in adults, that video games improve response inhibition, working memory, and other cognitive functions. The study claims that through analyzing data from studies in the past and similar studies in the future, a lot more will be able to be discovered about video games and their impact on the brain as well as their behavioural effects.
Some limitations that the study faced were derived from the researchers not taking into account the different genres of video games that might have been contributing to different beneficial cognitive effects. They also said that this study is not able to touch upon whether mental health symptoms or altered neuroplasticity were created from large amounts of video game consumption.
