A New Study Of American Children Found That Playing Video Games Might Actually Boost Intelligence
Since video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the United States, the activity has long been a source of struggle between parents and children.
Heated debates over screen time’s effect on the physical and mental health of adolescents have pushed many parents to limit or disallow video games in the home.
Yet, a recently published study in Scientific Reports has claimed that video gaming may actually increase your child’s intelligence.
A team of researchers at Karolinska Institutet, located in Sweden, set out to understand the link between intelligence and video game screen time in American children.
Over nine thousand boys and girls from the United States participated in the two-year-long study.
First, at either nine or ten years old, the children were presented with an array of psychological tests meant to measure cognitive ability.
At this time, every child’s screen time was also reported– including time spent watching television, scrolling social media, and playing video games.
Then, two years later, the researchers followed up with about five thousand of the children. The participants were asked to take the same psychological tests again before the scientists could study their cognitive ability differences over time.
The researchers made sure to control for any genetic differences that may lead to impacted cognitive ability scores, as well as differences in familial socio-economic status.
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The team first discovered that the children spent an average of two and a half hours watching television every day.
The children also averaged one hour of daily video game time and a half-hour of daily social media access.
Shockingly, the children who spent more time playing video games exhibited higher intelligence scores by about two and a half IQ points.
Compared to television and social media, no significant intelligence effects were observed for those activities.
Torkel Klingberg, a cognitive neuroscience professor at the Karolinska Institutet, explained how this study did not analyze other mental and physical health effects.
“We did not examine the effects of screen behavior on physical activity, sleep, well-being, or school performance. So, we cannot say anything about that,” Professor Klingberg noted.
Nonetheless, he is confident that the study’s results support a positive correlation between video games and intelligence.
“Our results support the claim that screen time generally does not impair children’s cognitive abilities and that playing video games can actually help boost intelligence,” Klingberg added.
Aside from this perhaps shocking finding, the team’s study also supports new studies that intelligence is not fixed. Instead, it can be influenced by environmental factors.
This area of research is what Klingberg hopes to explore next. He shared that the team will “now be studying the effects of other environmental factors and how the cognitive effects relate to childhood brain development.”
To read the study’s complete findings, visit the link here.
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