Of course, there are caveats.
A recent review of gaming studies spanning more than a decade found that teen and young adult gamers outperformed nongamers on several cognitive tasks. They were able to switch between visual tasks, divide their attention between different moving objects, and remember the location of hidden objects.
Some studies also found that gamers have higher amounts of gray matter, the outer layer of the brain that processes information.
Other screen habits, including watching short, fast-paced videos, such as those on TikTok, have been linked to shorter attention spans, and toggling between devices and apps has proven to be brain irritants. Researchers say gaming is in a different category of digital use that has been shown over the years to confer many benefits to the brain. However, the advantages disappear when gaming is high.
“Positive results have been seen in all people who have healthy relationships with gaming,” said Mona Moisala, a psychologist in Finland who helped review the literature.
Of course, the challenge is knowing just how much gaming is all about. (More on that below.)
The review, published last month in the Journal of the European Psychologist, did not include people who showed symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, which the World Health Organization called a year or more after consistently prioritizing gaming over other activities, despite negative consequences. was defined as. Researchers found that players with gaming disorder perform poorly on cognitive tasks and have more mental health problems than other teens.
no corpse
And the good news: Researchers say that all types of videogames can be beneficial.
Dr. Moisala, along with other colleagues in Finland, conducted a study on gaming in 2017 and found that the more often young people play—whether shooter games like “Call of Duty” or racing games like “Mario Kart”—the better they function- performed on memory tests. (It is the part of short-term memory that allows people to hold information temporarily, like a computer’s RAM.)
Unlike many studies, it did not compare enthusiastic gamers to nongamers, nor did it include any “heavy” gamers who play several hours a day. Dr. Moisala and colleagues studied teens and young adults who they considered moderate gamers, meaning they reported playing on a weekly or monthly basis, so that the results could be applied to the general population of gamers.
Letters were shown or told through headphones while lying in an MRI machine to 167 participants aged 13 to 24. They were asked to match or find letters in a test with increasing difficulty levels.
The most demanding level involved asking whether a letter they were shown or told matched what they had seen or heard from the first two sequences. The participants who reported spending the most time playing video games made fewer errors on the tests and had faster reaction times. They also demonstrated that more activity in the brain regions associated with working memory increases as the task becomes more difficult.
Dr. Moisala cautions that the cognitive benefits of gaming have not been proven to result in teens doing better in school or, say, better drivers for “Mario Kart”.
“Parents shouldn’t think that their kids should go out and start playing video games to gain cognitive benefits, if they haven’t already,” Dr. Moisala said. “But parents also shouldn’t worry about frying kids’ brains or making games for them. Zombies, because that’s not true.”
what to see
How to know if your child’s gaming habit is helpful or if all that time on the console is too much?
There is no magic number that determines when gaming becomes problematic, researchers say.
“One can be a pro gamer and be gaming for eight hours a day, but it’s for work,” Dr. Moisala said. “Someone else can play for an hour a day and then it’s really difficult to relax.”
What matters is whether gaming is interfering with children’s sleep, physical activity, nutrition, or grades, and whether kids enjoy working out with friends that doesn’t involve gaming. (In this column, teenage boys themselves explain how they balance gaming with other activities.)
According to the American Psychiatric Association, signs of a possible gaming disorder include withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety or irritability when gaming is removed, loss of interest in activities previously enjoyed and the amount of time family members spend gaming. cheat about.
If children’s gaming is becoming too distracting from other activities and they have difficulty cutting back, experts recommend seeing a general practitioner, rather than a gaming-addiction specialist, to assess whether they can play with other activities. Whether or not using the game to deal with the problems.
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