Video Games May Not Be As Harmful As You Think
We’ve all been told as a kid that video games are bad for us and don’t benefit us at all. However, video games may actually be more beneficial than you would think. A recent study conducted by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) to test and prove this theory.
About the Study
Previous studies about the cognitive effects of video games were not very effective due to a lack of participants, making them less effective, plus, the neurological mechanisms explaining the correlation between video games and cognitive behavior weren’t fully understood. This ongoing study that is currently being done by the ABCD study has 2,000 children where children who said that they played video games for multiple hours a day outperformed children who never played video games on cognitive tests requiring memory and impulse control. Researchers from the Universities of Burlington and Vermont evaluated the information from the ABCD Study with 9–10 year old children. To evaluate the data given from the study, they separated the people into one group with children who never played video games, and another group with children who played multiple hours of video games to compare how well the children are with memory and controlling impulsive behavior.
These scientists found that the group with children who played at least three hours of video games did better with both tasks compared to the other group of children who never played video games. They also used an MRI to measure the brain activity of both groups, and they found that the same group had a higher brain activity in different sections of the brain, being the sections that are used to perform the two tasks and the frontal sections. They also noticed that the sections of the brain associated with vision had a lower brain activity.
Because of this study, the scientists believe that these patterns come from doing activities that require a high cognitive demand. Since impulse control and memory are certain activities that can be found in video games, continuously playing and practicing these activities can lead to a better performance compared to people who have not practiced these activities through video games.
However, this study does not 100% confirm if these results are fully accurate and representative of the observations made in the study. Bader Chaarani, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont mentioned:
“While we cannot say whether playing video games regularly caused superior neurocognitive performance, it is an encouraging finding, and one that we must continue to investigate in these children as they transition into adolescence and young adulthood. Many parents today are concerned about the effects of video games on their children’s health and development, and as these games continue to proliferate among young people, it is crucial that we better understand both the positive and negative impact that such games may have.”
Another article written by Alexander A Gunawan, Hansel Hosea, Ryan Christian, and Charles Reynaldo also talk about how video games can improve cognitive skills and decision making. These authors talk about multiple previous experiments and literature review studies and evaluate them. The results ended up showing that video games can improve decisions made and cognitive skills in tasks mentioned earlier, like memory and impulse control. The article says that perception, attentional control, and decision-making are certain tasks that can improve while playing video games. Also, results showed that high school and undergrad students that played video games had better results with tasks that were associated with cognitive skills compared to students that did not play video games.
In conclusion, video games may not be as bad as previous negative claims had about them. Video games allow people to use specific cognitive skills and abilities, like memory, reaction time, and impulse control, which in turn can be used as an advantage in certain scenarios where those skills are needed. This has been shown with previous experiments, where most people who have played video games have done better at certain tasks involving cognitive abilities compared to people who have never played video games. While these have usually been the results of these experiments, more research is needed to fully solidify how beneficial video games actually are. This does not mean you should be playing video games all the time, as too much video games can be harmful. There should be a balance to how much you play video games.
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