Kids Who Play Video Games Score Higher on Brain Function Tests (theverge.com) 47
Kids who play video games have better memory and better control over their motor skills than kids who don't, according to a new study looking at adolescent brain function. From a report: Video games might not be responsible for those differences -- the study can't say what the causes are -- but the findings add to a bigger body of work showing gamers have better performance on some tests of brain function. That lends support to efforts to develop games that can treat cognitive problems. "This study adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development," said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a statement.
The study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which launched in 2018 and is tracking brain development in thousands of children in the United States as they grow into adulthood. Participants periodically go through a battery of assessments, including brain imaging, cognitive tasks, mental health screenings, physical health exams, and other tests. To study video games and cognition, the research team on this new study pulled from the first set of assessments in the ABCD study. It included data on 2,217 children who were nine and 10 years old. The ABCD study asked participants how many hours of video games they played on a typical weekday or weekend day. The research team divided the group into video gamers (kids who played at least 21 hours per week) and non-video gamers (kids who played no video games per week). Kids who only played occasionally weren't included in the study. Then, the research team looked at the kids' performance on tests that measure attention, impulse control, and memory.
The study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which launched in 2018 and is tracking brain development in thousands of children in the United States as they grow into adulthood. Participants periodically go through a battery of assessments, including brain imaging, cognitive tasks, mental health screenings, physical health exams, and other tests. To study video games and cognition, the research team on this new study pulled from the first set of assessments in the ABCD study. It included data on 2,217 children who were nine and 10 years old. The ABCD study asked participants how many hours of video games they played on a typical weekday or weekend day. The research team divided the group into video gamers (kids who played at least 21 hours per week) and non-video gamers (kids who played no video games per week). Kids who only played occasionally weren't included in the study. Then, the research team looked at the kids' performance on tests that measure attention, impulse control, and memory.
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Brains have significant plasticity. They adapt to what they're used for. As a result, you're almost certainly party correct because one doesn't just dismiss billions of years of evolution that lead to organism that is modern human and their massive investment into their brain and it's higher functions specifically.
But it's a folly to forget that one of the biggest advantages of our brain is its adaptability. We can both learn the exact pattern of movement to perform a complex set of operations on a producti
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It's probably a little bit of both. Certain exercises grow your mental and physical abilities, that's common sense and only people with a malicious intent to control society by keeping video games taboo through social engineering would ever have claimed video games could be an exception to this truism. But also people tend to gravitate to things for which they already have aptitude, because the payoff for the exercise comes quicker and easier. For example, people who grow taller than their peers earlier in
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Or, kids who play video games see cognitive testing as just another video game and adapted to the dynamics faster.
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Or, kids who play video games see cognitive testing as just another video game and adapted to the dynamics faster.
So you’re saying, . . . Video games . . . Are like exercise for the brain?!?
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Kids with higher functioning brains tend to play video games more.
There is a limit on how far you can stretch the correlation!=causation meme to avoid inconvenient conclusions.
Would you say the same with sports and cardiovascular capacity? I.e. "Kids who play sports score higher on cardiovascular tests" -> "Kids with higher functioning cardiovascular capacity tend to play sports more".
Or more specific, let's try basketball? "Kids who play more basketball wins more basketball games" -> "Kids good at basketball tend to play more basketball".
Then how about doing hom
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It's a bit of both, and they didn't control for what the kids who didn't play videogames, were doing instead. These days, I imagine some of the non-videogame kids were sitting in front of streaming video 16 hours a day, drooling on themselves; or playing sports, which is almost as bad.
There are numerous things that you can do that are *better* than videogames for higher brain function. But apart from maybe reading (depending on *what* you're reading), they're not particularly popular activities these days
Video Games have the potential to teach (Score:5, Insightful)
Video Games, such as MMORPGs, co-op Looter Shooters, team games, etc. have the potential to teach multiple things:
* Overcoming failure / Don't Give Up
* Hard work / Grind
* Lateral Thinking
* Communication
* Teamwork
* Strategy
* Tactics
* Optimization min/max
The problem is when video games become a substitute for other mediums and as such skills such as "critical thinking" aren't taught. Paul Lockhard wrote a famous A Mathematician's Lament [maa.org] how kids weren't learning the joy of discovery and being force to learn by rote. This is a shitty way of learning. Games provide a much more self-directed approach.
Take for example Minecraft. With redstone you can learn Boolean Algebra but in a fun, hands-on way.
Games should be used a "jumping off" points for a deep dive into topics that kids find interesting.
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One of the biggest failures in our society today with regards to appropriate use of technology is that we've chased all the people who are serious about teaching away from all the people who are serious about making good video games.
Re:Video Games have the potential to teach (Score:5, Interesting)
To add on to what you're saying I'd suggest that most video games are a good exercise in kids solving problems on their own which I think is something that not all kids learn and is fundamental to being an adult.
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so it's basically computer-assisted masturbation.
Computers have advanced far since their beginnings, haven't they?
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In theory, yes. But in practice, the way my sons play Legend of Zelda games is that one has the controller while the other has a notebook computer so he can look up solutions to puzzles any time it gets difficult. They call this "teamwork".
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The biggest discrepancy between video games and life is always going to be that life is not fair and cannot ever be made fair, while video games that people actually play generally have some fairness to them.
While you can also make video games that are unfair, people would most likely choose not to ultimately play them, or at least not play them enough that one is liable to learn any useful life skills from them.
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Re:Video Games have the potential to teach (Score:5, Funny)
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a.k.a. The Art of Trash Talking =P
Although Monkey Island 1 did it a decade earlier with The Art of Insult Sword Fighting [fandom.com] :-)
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You can blame casinos for games adopting [stackexchange.com] their "whales", "dolphins", and "minnows" terminology. The automotive industry has always nickled-and-dimed customers though. Pretty sure that was before games added MTX. BMW charging a monthly subscription [theverge.com] for seat warmers is just the latest shenanigans of greed.
Speaking of MTX, games such as Diablo Immortal and Gran Turismo 7 are SO disrespectful of a gamer's time, mind, and wallet with huge microtransactions becoming macrotransactions gamers are starting to cal
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Re: Video Games have the potential to teach (Score:2)
They are a substitute for learning to play an instrument, doing chores daily, learning a crafts, learning art, being social....all things where the more the elders of the household knew and taught the better the children functioned in life.
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kids weren't learning the joy of discovery and being force to learn by rote. This is a shitty way of learning.
Learning what?
Learning perseverance? Learning to do things that you have to do even if you may not like it at first? Learning that most things in the world won't be specifically crafted to your learning style?
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The problem with teaching kids critical thinking skills is: once they "get it," they start disagreeing with you. Nobody wants THAT!
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With redstone you can learn Boolean Algebra but in a fun, hands-on way.
I'm going to guess what you have in your head is the easy part. The very basic concepts that students don't struggle anyway. Even then, the game will definitely get in the way. It's way too tedious and indirect to be practical. If you just want to show digital logic circuits in action, or let them build their own, there are a ton of better programs you can use. It would be hard to do worse.
As for boolean algebra proper, Minecraft isn't going to help you there either. The most I'll grant you here is tha
And score worse (Score:2)
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Did not work in my case. I was top of the class in these. I feel cheated...
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I know several examples of people who played, even on math classes, on plain sight of the teacher, but scored full points from the tests so teacher could not really do anything to them.
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I had never heard of Project 100,000 [wikipedia.org] before. TIL. Thanks!
I wonder if there is any overlap with police rejecting applications [nytimes.com] with TOO high of an I.Q. back in 2000?
Maybe if you are good it's more fun? (Score:3)
So, this may be some sort of self selection bias.
If you suck at video games, are you going to play them? Probably not.
What are the things that could cause you to suck at video games? Could it be lack of attention, impulse control, memory, motor control?
Hmm.
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correlation != causation (Score:3)
In India, most states conduct a statewide exam for 10th and 12th grade. It is a mandatory uniform testing for all the students within each state. In our days, there were no vide games. But when they came more than a decade later, I could see a strong correlation between performance in 12th grade score and video game performance. So it is other way around. People with strong brain functions can play better video games.
big brain (Score:2)
My daughter plays games on her computer for hours every day. She also gets straight A's. She calls herself 'big brain'.
The Ukraine angle (Score:2)
Who says? (Score:4, Funny)
Kids Who Play Video Games Score Higher on Brain Function Tests
According to pew pew pew research.
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> According to pew pew pew research.
Well ride my green pony, there really is such a place. [pewresearch.org]
Meanwhile, in the brains of hysterical people... (Score:2)
Correlation != Causality (Score:3)
Studies show that kids who were involved in skateboarding had worse measurable outcomes (grades, arrests, drug-use, etc.). No one thinks that skateboards or skateboarding actually caused these outcomes. It was just that that hobby put people into a culture where that stuff was going on and so they ended up going along with it.
It's probably the same thing with video games. My friends and I did LAN parties on Friday nights in high school and stayed up late playing Starcraft 2 and League of Legends in college. I don't think this helped our grades, but it kept us away from the kinds of places and people that might have been bad influences on us. Even just staying home playing video games by yourself keeps you away from some things that can really send your life to a bad place.
Proof! (Score:1)
> The study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study...
If the Acronym Department hadn't been gamers, they wouldn't have come up with such a spiffy acronym.
Seems kind of obvious... (Score:2)
Myself and most of the other gamers I know are much more likely to play computer and board games instead of consuming passive entertainment like TV. The games require your brain to be engaged, and depending on the game, you're using at minimum hand-eye coordination (first-person shooters), and maybe spatial reasoning, mathematics, physics, logic, etc. (games like Factorio, puzzle games, KSP), and even complex social and strategy skills (if you dare to play games like Twilight Imperium).
You also knows what treats cognitive problems? (Score:2)
That's not all... (Score:1)