Posts tagged gaming
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Gaming vs. reading: Do they benefit teenagers with cognition or school performance?
Children have an increasing attraction towards electronic media in their play. With video games, phones and the internet in abundance, this article in Educational Psychology examines if such leisure activity is impacting children’s cognition or academic performance or whether it would be more beneficial to read.
After a busy day children do need downtime to rest and relax. Increasingly kids leisure time is spent gaming, but does it detract from homework or would kids be better off reading a book? Historical research shows in some cases that interactive gaming can have positive effects for cognition by promoting memory, attention and reasoning. Other speed oriented games have been shown to improve perception and motor skills, so should gaming for relaxation be encouraged? Lieury et al investigate whether type of leisure activity produces a ‘transfer effect’ influencing learning processes thus improving student performance at school. With an emphasis on gaming and reading they linked patterns of leisure activity with performance in phonology, reading and comprehension, maths, long term memory and reasoning. Fascinatingly gaming previously thought to improve fluid intelligence showed little or no positive correlations to performance whilst reading did, particularly in memory and comprehension. It seems then despite lack of a causal link that reading may be more likely to enhance academic performance.
Should we assume that time spent gaming and away from homework is harmful to students? A further comparison of reading and gaming to most frequent leisure activities showed no negative patterns but interestingly resting had a favourable effect on performance as well as reading. So frequent leisure activity is not necessarily harmful to progress, or always at the expense of homework but can be enriching. The authors conclude “we think that video games are mainly recreational activities and the cognitive stimulation provided is very different from school learning. On the contrary, the results of this survey fully justify the educational role of parents and teachers in promoting reading.”
(Image: Shutterstock)
New Studies Show Promise for Brain Training in Improving Fluid Intelligence
Whether computerized games designed by psychologists and neuroscientists can literally make people smarter has been hotly debated by scientists, with a small but outspoken cadre of skeptics demanding stronger proof. Now two new studies have found the kind of real-world benefits from the brain-training games that skeptics have been calling for.
The first, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that less than six hours of brain games played over the course of 10 weeks enabled poor first-graders who attend school irregularly due to family problems to catch up with their regularly-attending peers in math and language grades.
The second, presented over the weekend at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in Boston, combined the results of 13 previous studies of computerized brain-training in young adults to conclude that training significantly enhances fluid intelligence—the fundamental human ability to detect patterns, reason, and learn. That is, practicing the games literally makes people smarter.
Together with other recent studies demonstrating real-world benefits of brain training in healthy older adults, preschoolers, and school children with ADHD, the new papers appear to provide fresh ammunition to psychologists and neuroscientists whose research has been under attack by a handful of skeptics who insist that the training is a waste of time.
Feelings of Failure, Not Violent Content, Foster Aggression in Video Gamers
The disturbing imagery or violent storylines of videos games like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto are often accused of fostering feelings of aggression in players. But a new study shows hostile behavior is linked to gamers’ experiences of failure and frustration during play—not to a game’s violent content.
The study is the first to look at the player’s psychological experience with video games instead of focusing solely on its content. Researchers found that failure to master a game and its controls led to frustration and aggression, regardless of whether the game was violent or not. The findings of the study were published online in the March edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Any player who has thrown down a remote control after losing an electronic game can relate to the intense feelings or anger failure can cause,” explains lead author Andrew Przybylski, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, who said such frustration is commonly known among gamers as “rage-quitting.”
Video games: bad or good for your memory?
After the horrific shooting sprees at Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007, players of violent video games, such as First Person Shooter (FPS) games, have often been accused in the media of being impulsive, antisocial, or aggressive.
Positive effects
However, the question is: do First Person Shooter games also have positive effects for our mental processes? At the University of Leiden, we investigated whether gaming could be a fast and easy way to improve your memory.
Develop an adaptive mindset
Indeed, the new generations of FPS (compared to strategic) games are not just about pressing a button at the right moment but require the players to develop an adaptive mindset to rapidly react and monitor fast moving visual and auditory stimuli.
Gamers compared to non-gamers
In a study published in Psychological Research Journal, Dr. Lorenza Colzato and her fellow researchers compared, on a task related to working memory, people who played at least five hours weekly with people who never played video games.
More flexible brain
The researchers found that gamers outperformed non-gamers. They suggest that video game experience trains your brain to become more flexible in the updating and monitoring of new information enhancing the memory capacity of the gamers.
Autistic Children’s Love For Video Games Could Lead To New Treatment Options
Kids and teenagers suffering from autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are more likely to use television and video games and less likely to spend time on social media than their normally-developing counterparts, claims new research set for publication in a future issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Micah Mazurek, an assistant professor of health psychology and a clinical child psychologist at the University of Missouri, recruited 202 children and adolescents with ASD and 179 of their typically developing siblings for the study.
Those with ASD spent more time playing video games and watching TV than spending time on physical or pro-social activities (including spending time on websites like Facebook or Twitter). The opposite was also true: typically-developing children spent more time on non-screen-related activities than they did watching shows or playing on the PS3 or the Xbox 360, according to the soon-to-be-published study.
“Many parents and clinicians have noticed that children with ASD are fascinated with technology, and the results of our recent studies certainly support this idea,” Mazurek said in a statement. “We found that children with ASD spent much more time playing video games than typically developing children, and they are much more likely to develop problematic or addictive patterns of video game play.”
In a separate study of 169 boys with ASD, excessive video game use had been linked to oppositional behaviors, such as refusal to follow directions or getting into arguments with others. Mazurek said that the issues will need to be further examined in future, closely-controlled research.
“Because these studies were cross-sectional, it is not clear if there is a causal relationship between video game use and problem behaviors,” she said. “Children with ASD may be attracted to video games because they can be rewarding, visually engaging and do not require face-to-face communication or social interaction. Parents need to be aware that, although video games are especially reinforcing for children with ASD, children with ASD may have problems disengaging from these games.”
Despite those issues, Mazurek also believes that autistic children’s love for video games and television could be used for beneficial purposes. The professor believes that discovering what makes these screen-related pastimes so attractive to kids with ASD could help researchers and medical experts develop new treatment options.
“Using screen-based technologies, communication and social skills could be taught and reinforced right away,” Mazurek explained. “However, more research is needed to determine whether the skills children with ASD might learn in virtual reality environments would translate into actual social interactions.”
Authors: Develop digital games to improve brain function and well-being
Neuroscientists should help to develop compelling digital games that boost brain function and improve well-being, say two professors specializing in the field in a commentary article published in the science journal Nature.
In the Feb. 28 issue, the two — Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester and Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison — urge game designers and brain scientists to work together to design new games that train the brain, producing positive effects on behavior, such as decreasing anxiety, sharpening attention and improving empathy. Already, some video games are designed to treat depression and to encourage cancer patients to stick with treatment, the authors note.
Davidson is founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the UW’s Waisman Center. Bavelier is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Rochester.
Video game usage, which continues to rise among American children, has been associated with a number of negative outcomes, such as obesity, aggressiveness, antisocial behavior and, in extreme cases, addiction. “At the same time, evidence is mounting that playing games can have a beneficial effects on the brain,” the authors write.
Last year, Bavelier and Davidson presided over a meeting at the White House in which neuroscientists met with entertainment media experts to discuss ways of using interactive technology such as video games to further understanding of brain functions, as well as to provide new, engaging tools for boosting attention and well-being.
Bavelier’s work is focused on how humans learn and how the brain adapts to changes in experience, either by nature (as in deafness) or by training (such as playing video games). Her lab investigates how new media, including video games, can be leveraged to foster learning and brain plasticity.
Davidson, who studies emotion and the brain, is leading a project in collaboration with UW-Madison’s Games + Learning + Society to develop two video games designed to help middle school students develop social and emotional skills, such as empathy, cooperation, mental focus and self-regulation.
"Gradually, this work will begin to document the burning social question of how technology is having an impact on our brains and our lives, and enable us to make evidence-based choices about the technologies of the future, to produce a new set of tools to cultivate positive habits of mind," the authors conclude.