The concerns parents have had for years that young ones who play video games for hours on end or who favor games of a certain genre may experience negative effects on their cognitive abilities are put to rest by new research findings that were published in the Journal of Media Psychology.
A member of the research team, Professor Jie Zhang, says that “Our studies turned up no links, regardless of how long the kids played games and what types of games they chose.”
Researchers used data from 160 diverse preteen students, 70 percent of whom came from lower income homes, to draw their results.
The young participants said that they spent an average of 2.5 hours each day playing video games, with the most avid players clocking up to 4.5 hours every day.
The team sought to determine if the students’ gaming was related to how well they did on the standardized Cognitive Ability Test 7 (CogAT) which assesses verbal, numerical, and nonverbal/spatial abilities.
In contrast to earlier research efforts that relied on teacher reported grades or self reported learning evaluations, CogAT was chosen as a standard measure this time around.
The principal investigator of the study, professor May Jadalla, goes on to explain that “Overall, neither duration nor choice of game genres had significant correlations with CogAT measures. That result shows no direct link between gaming and cognitive performance, despite what has been assumed.”
All that being said, Zhang also stresses that “When it comes to games, finding common ground between parents and kids is tricky enough. At least we now understand that finding balance in childhood development is key, and there is no need for us to over worry about video gaming.”
All in all, there were no meaningful connections between the CogAT results and either the length of playtime or the types of video games played.
Similar to this, no significant impact was seen when adopting an “extreme-groups” strategy to evaluate associations with playing a subcategory of games promoted as improving cognitive abilities in kids either!
Thus, these findings are at odds not just with theories that predict decreased cognitive ability in kids who play a lot of video games but also with earlier research that suggested potential advantages to playing specific kinds of games.