Video Games Might Make Kids Smarter?

Not the games I have seen them play, here some interesting results.

Boomer Humor Was Wrong: Video Games Might Make Kids Smarter in Extremetech

By Jessica Hall on May 25, 2022 at 3:13 pm

“TV will rot your brain!” We’ve all heard that old canard. The idea that screen time makes kids dumber is a staple of the “Father, I cannot click the book” genre of boomer humor. But science is turning that narrative on its head. A newly published report using data from an ABCD Study indicates that screen time doesn’t rot kids’ brains after all. On the contrary: video games might actually make kids smarter.

The ABCD Study

The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is a gigantic longitudinal study of American child health and brain development.

The ABCD study timeline.

Participants begin at 9-10 years of age. Through its massive slate of tests and surveys, the project records a wide array of behavioral, biometric, and genetic information from participants and their parents. Then, project scientists follow up with participant families until the kids are 19-20 years old.

Data from the project is freely available for other researchers to use in their own studies. Once or twice a year, the ABCD Study releases another updated dataset. Now, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Karolinska Institutet of Sweden have used that data to find out what video gaming really does to childrens’ brains.

Video Games Can Make Kids Smarter

“For our study,” two of the new study’s authors explain in a joint statement, “we were specifically interested in the effect of screen time on intelligence – the ability to learn effectively, think rationally, understand complex ideas, and adapt to new situations.”

In particular, their model looked at how much time kids spent staring at glowing rectangles, and even how they used their screen time. For example, most of the kids in the study used their screen time in three different ways: watching videos (e.g. YouTube), socializing online, or playing video games. It compared gamers and non-gamers on tasks including reading comprehension, memory, visual-spatial processing, and executive function.

The researchers wanted to cover a wide variety of subdomains of intelligence. “However, intelligence is highly heritable in the populations we’ve studied so far,” study author Dr. Bruno Sauce explained to us over Zoom. Furthermore, “genetic and socioeconomic factors were our two major confounders.” So, to account for variations in these factors, the researchers rolled in genetic data and socioeconomic information from the participants’ parents. .... '