For decades, there have been warnings about video games. Negative associations often cited include addiction, distraction and aggression - all of which are likely to have a knock-on effect in the classroom.
But in recent years, the conversation has changed. For example, research from the University of Oxford, published in 2019, found no causal evidence that violent video game play leads to aggression in the real world.
And in 2020, further research from the university found that the amount of time spent playing video games was a small but significant positive factor in people’s wellbeing, and that players who experience genuine enjoyment from the games also experience more positive wellbeing.
In October, a new study was published by the University of Vermont which takes this new narrative one step further and suggests that, actually, video gaming can have a positive effect on young people’s cognition, too.
Bader Chaarani, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, led the research. The study took data from the ABCD study, which is the largest study of brain development and child health in the US. It is tracking almost 12,000 students from the age of 9-10, through to adolescence.
At the start of the study, the children took part in two cognitive tests while in an MRI scanner: the “stop signal task”, which tests impulse control and response inhibition, and the “n-back task”, which tests working memory processing.
The children were also surveyed about how long each day they spent gaming on any device. Chaarani and his team then selected two groups of children: those who didn’t play at all and those who played for three hours or more a day. This left the researchers with 2,217 children.
Chaarani and his colleagues analysed the two sets of data and found that those children aged 9 and 10 who played video games for three hours or more a day outperformed those who never played any type of video games, in terms of both impulse control and working memory.
In addition to this better performance, the researchers saw activation changes in key areas of the brain involved in vision, attention and memory processing.
Chaarani says that one explanation for the difference between the two groups may be that the video games are providing extra opportunities for children to rehearse certain cognitive skills.
“One hypothesis is that these games are practice for the brain. When a child plays three hours or more per day, that’s an extensive amount of their daily life dedicated to one activity that engages different areas in the brain involved in problem-solving and faster reactions,” he says.
“Practising those skills every day is like going to the gym for the brain.”
Experienced teachers may baulk at Chaarani’s phrasing here, recalling the once popular but now widely debunked “Brain Gym” programme, which uses kinaesthetic movements supposedly to stimulate the brain.
Those teachers might be right to be cautious; while the mental “workouts” that video games provide are very different to those used in Brain Gym, it’s not yet clear how well they will translate to improved learning in real classrooms.
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One of the limitations of the study, Chaarani points out, is that it includes data collected at just one time point: when the children were aged 9 and 10. Therefore, the researchers can’t conclude that playing video games directly causes better impulse control and working memory, but only that it is associated with those skills.
Questions also remain about whether the genre of the game makes a difference, although Chaarani has his own theories here.
“There are some smaller papers which suggest there are different outcomes by gaming genre,” he says.
“I looked at international surveys on kids aged 9 and 10, and it seems like the majority prefer to play fast-paced games like Call of Duty, rather than slow-paced games like chess. In fast-paced games, children need to have faster reactions, they need to analyse visual data and problem-solve. These are all cognitive functions, so it’s these games which I predict will make an impact.”
More research is needed to say anything with more certainty, though - and that research is already beginning to happen.
The ABCD study is in its seventh year, and the same questions were asked to children aged 12 and 14. Crucially, they were asked about the type of game they played, too. This data set will be the basis of a new longitudinal study by Chaarani and his team, which aims to find out if the associations they found persist as children age.
All of this, however, comes with a warning: the researchers found that children who played the games for more than three hours a day reported slightly more symptoms of mental health problems than those who didn’t.
These findings, Chaarani stresses, are not statistically or clinically significant. They’re also at odds with the 2020 Oxford research into video games and wellbeing. But clearly, this is a facet which needs further exploration.
As things stand, then, teachers shouldn’t be reaching for the games consoles just yet - although, when the results of Chaarani’s longitudinal study are published in a few years’ time, it might be worth another look.
If nothing else, what the existing study perhaps reiterates is that, when it comes to developing cognitive skills such as impulse control and working memory function, repeated practice can make all the difference.
Whether that practice happens through video games or another type of activity might not matter - the important thing, for teachers, is to ensure that it happens.
