Video games have a bad image among many parents. A study by the University of Vermont could inspire you to rethink. According to this, children who play have a higher impulse control and a better working memory than those who do not gamble. The team led by Bader Chaarani compared how more than 2,000 nine- and ten-year-olds performed on cognitive performance tests while lying in the brain scanner. Among them were adolescents who played at least three hours a day at the computer, console or mobile phone, and others who did not do this at all. The better performance in the tasks was accompanied by higher activities in brain regions associated with attention and memory. The authors suspect a higher sensitivity to task-relevant stimuli.
While previous studies found a connection between video games, depression and aggressive behavior, such things were not found here. However, it cannot be concluded from the results that video games improve mental performance. Cognitively gifted children may have more fun gaming. It could also be that the little subjects had an unwanted advantage with experience in gaming: In the study, they had to react with an input device as quickly and precisely as possible what happened on the screen in front of their eyes - this is reminiscent of typical challenges in a video game , as the doctor Kirk Welker from the Mayo Clinic notes in Rochester in a comment. "We cannot say whether regularly playing video games leads to better neurocognitive achievements," says Chaarani. "But it is an encouraging result that we have to continue to examine these children if they pass into youth and young adulthood."
