In a recent research involving 2,000 youngsters aged 9 to 10, video gamers’ brains revealed increased activity in areas involved with attention and memory.

Parents often express concern about the negative effects of video games on their children, ranging from mental health and social difficulties to a lack of exercise.

However, a big new US research published in JAMA Network Open on Monday suggests that the popular activity may also have cognitive advantages.

As an avid gamer with expertise in neuroimagery, lead author Bader Chaarani, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont, told AFP he was naturally attracted to the issue.

Prior study has concentrated on the negative impacts of gaming, relating it to despair and increased violence.

According to Charaani, these research were restricted by the very small number of participants, especially those using brain imaging.

Chaarani and colleagues conducted the new study by analyzing data from the vast and continuing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is financed by the National Institutes of Health.

They examined survey responses, cognitive test results, and brain scans from around 2,000 nine- and ten-year-olds divided into two groups: those who never played games and those who played for three hours or more each day.

This threshold was set since it surpasses the American Academy of Pediatrics’ screen time limits for older children of one or two hours playing video games.

Memory and impulses

Two tasks were assigned to each group.

The first entailed the students seeing arrows pointing left or right and being instructed to push left or right as quickly as they could.

They were also instructed not to push anything if they saw a “stop” indication in order to assess their ability to control their impulses.

In the second exercise, students were given pictures of people’s faces and then asked whether a later photo matched or not, as a test of their working memory.

The researchers discovered that video gamers scored consistently higher on both tasks after controlling for characteristics that may distort findings, such as parental income, IQ, and mental health symptoms, using statistical approaches.

The children’s brains were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging as they completed the activities (fMRI). The brains of video gamers exhibited increased activity in areas related with attention and memory.

“The findings suggest the fascinating potential that video gaming may offer a cognitive training experience with observable neurocognitive impacts,” the paper’s authors stated.

According to Chaarani, it is currently impossible to determine whether improved cognitive performance causes or results from more gaming.

The researchers want to acquire a more definitive response as the study progresses and they look at the same youngsters at later ages.

This will also assist to rule out other possible influences including the children’s home environment, exercise, and sleep quality.

Future research might benefit from knowing what kind of games the children were playing, albeit around the age of 10, youngsters prefer action games like Fortnite or Assassin’s Creed.

“Of course, excessive screen time is detrimental to general mental health and physical exercise,” Chaarani added.

However, he said that the findings indicated that video games may be a better use of screen time than viewing films on YouTube, which has no noticeable cognitive impact.

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