Could Video Games Boost a Child’s Intelligence. Folks frequently accept that video games decay a youngster’s brain, however another study argues the opposite could be valid.
Children actually could get a brain boost from playing a large number of hours of video games, researchers report.
American kids somewhere in the range of 9 and 10 years of age who spent additional time playing video games encountered a significant increase in their intelligence scores when retested two years later – – amounting to an extra 2.5 IQ points above the average.
“Children who played more video games were the ones encountering the most gains in intelligence after two years,” researchers deduced in their paper Windows 11 desktop, which was as of late published in the journal Scientific Reports. “This is proof of a beneficial causal impact of video games on perception.”
Different forms of screen time – – watching videos or chatting on social media – – had neither a positive nor negative impact on a youngster’s intelligence, the researchers found. The study got no financing from the video game industry.
“We didn’t examine the effects of screen behavior on physical activity, sleep, prosperity or school performance, so we can’t say anything about that,” senior researcher Torkel Klingberg, a professor of mental neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said in an institute news release.
“However, our results support the claim that screen time generally doesn’t impair children’s mental abilities, and that playing video games can actually assist with boosting intelligence,” Klingberg said. “This is consistent with several experimental studies of video-game playing.”
Higher scores
For this study, Klingberg and his colleagues analyzed data on more than 9,000 boys and girls participating in a drawn out U.S.- supported study of brain advancement and child health.
At ages 9 to 10, the kids went through a battery of psychological tests to gauge their general brain power. They were also asked how long they spent watching TV and videos, playing video games, and engaging with social media.
On average, the kids spent 2.5 hours a day watching TV, a half-hour on social media, and one hour playing video games.
Two years later, just north of 5,000 of the children repeated the psychological tests, to see how their intelligence had changed.
Results showed that kids who played more than the average hour of video games daily ended up with higher intelligence scores than kids who spent less time with a game regulator.
That increase remained significant even after researchers accounted for different factors such as differences in household pay and parental education.
Active vs. passive
Video games could make kids smarter by making them think, giving “improved” environments that expect them to tackle tasks they probably won’t experience in that frame of mind to-day lives, said Dr. Anish Dube, an individual from the American Psychological Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and their Families.
“Playing video games frequently requires active strategizing, planning and leader decision-making,” said Dube, who wasn’t part of the study.
