Children who play video games 21 hours a week do better on cognitive tests

Video games are often slandered by parents and the media, but a recent study of 2,217 9- and 10-year-olds found that children who played video games at least 21 hours a week performed better on tests of cognitive ability involving reactive inhibition and working memory than children who didn’t play video games at all.

The research, led by scientists from the University of Vermont Department of Psychiatry, is published in the journal JAMA network open.

Video games are everywhere

In the space of three decades, video games have gone from being rare to becoming ubiquitous in modern society. Almost three-quarters of kids aged 2 to 17 are no longer relegated to the realm of nerds, playing it, whether on computers, consoles or smartphones, leaving parents wondering, “What’s the right amount?”

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that children over the age of two play video games no more than one hour on school days and no more than two hours on non-school days.

More broadly, scientists have investigated whether gaming is associated with changes in behavior and cognitive functioning in children. Previous research has linked heavy gambling to slightly increased rates of aggression, depression, and violence. At the same time, however, heavy gamers tend to outperform their peers on various measures of cognitive ability. However, research on both behavior and cognitive abilities tended to suffer from small sample sizes.

The new study doesn’t. Thousands of children participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study were divided into two groups: those who played video games at least 21 hours a week (well above AAP recommendations) and those who played none at all. Participants were challenged with a Stop Signal Task (SST) – designed to measure inhibitory control – in which they were asked to work on a simple, quick task on a computer until a “stop” signal was given became. They were also given an N-Back task – a test of working memory – which asked them to quickly recall something that was presented to them previously. Both cognitive assessments were conducted while the subjects sat in an fMRI brain scanner.

On both tasks, the players outperformed the non-players by about 5% to 10%. In addition, their brains showed higher activity in regions associated with attention and memory and in frontal brain regions associated with more cognitively challenging tasks.

While gamers and non-gamers did not differ in terms of age, BMI, or IQ, gamers were disproportionately male and had lower parental income. The differences in income actually contribute to the robustness of the finding. Higher parental income is often closely linked to all sorts of improved children’s outcomes, from health to behavior to intelligence. So the fact that child players from poorer backgrounds tended to outperform non-players from richer backgrounds is certainly interesting.

Is Tetris the same as Grand Theft Auto?

The researchers warn that not all video games are likely to be equally useful: a violent first-person shooter, for example, is undeniably different than an educational, strategy, or puzzle-solving game. Their study didn’t find out which games the participants actually played. In addition, they warned that the study is only a snapshot in time, assessing correlation rather than causation.

However, future data releases from the ABCD study group as participants age should allow the scientists to detect changes in cognitive abilities. Will gamers continue to outperform their non-gaming counterparts and maybe widen their lead? We will see.