Some good news: Children’s brains may benefit from video games

We have been led to believe that too much time spent on computers is harmful to children’s brain development.

This would include time spent playing video games. Video gaming has also been linked to depression and increased aggression.

A new study, published in JAMA Network Open recently, finds, however, that this pastime may in fact have cognitive benefits .

For the new research, Bader Chaarani and colleagues analysed data from the large and ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health in the USA.

They looked at survey answers, cognitive test results, and brain images from around 2,000 nine- and ten-year-olds, who were separated into two groups: those who never played games, and those who played for three hours or more a day. This threshold was chosen as it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines of one or two hours of video games for older children.

Impulses and memory

Each group was assessed in two tasks. The first involved seeing arrows pointing left or right, with the children asked to press left or right as fast as they could.

They were also told to not press anything if they saw a “stop” signal, to measure how well they could control their impulses.
In the second task, they were shown people’s faces, and then asked if a subsequent picture shown later on matched or not, in a test of their working memory.

After using statistical methods to control for variables that could skew results, such as parental income, IQ, and mental health symptoms, the team found the video gamers performed consistently better on both tasks.

As they performed the tasks, the children’s brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Video gamers’ brains showed more activity in regions associated with attention and memory.

“The results raise the intriguing possibility that video gaming may provide a cognitive training experience with measurable neurocognitive effects,” the authors concluded in their paper.

Of course, it is not clear from this study whether better cognitive performance is the result of gaming or the reason why children enjoy gaming. The team hope to get a more clear answer as the study continues and they look again at the same children at older ages. This will also help exclude other potential factors at play such as the children’s home environment, exercise and sleep quality.

Future studies could also benefit from knowing what genres of games the children were playing—though at age 10 children tend to favor action games like Fortnite or Assassin’s Creed.

In spite of this intriguing result, Chaarani does warn that excessive use of screen time is bad for overall mental health and physical activity.

However, the study shows that video games might be a better use of screen time than watching videos or other mindless programmes, which has no discernible cognitive effects.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.