Children and adolescents spend a lot of time in front of screens (mobile, console, tablet, computer, television), and therefore the positive and negative aspects of their use and how it can affect their physical and psychological health and their cognitive abilities are the subject from numerous studies. Now scientists from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have found that the intelligence of children who spent above average time playing video games also increased above average, while watching TV or interacting with social media did not. they had no effect, neither positive nor negative.
Despite the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) considers that abusing video games is a mental disorder, it is not the first time that a study has revealed that this activity has advantages for children; for example, recent research found that children who play video games regularly at 11 years of age have a 24% lower risk of developing depression three years later, and it has also been shown that they can improve mobility in children with paralysis cerebral.
The authors of the new research studied the link between the screen habits of more than 9,000 American boys and girls and the development of their intelligence over time. The participants underwent various psychological tests measuring their general cognitive abilities when they were nine or 10 years old. and their parents were asked how much time the minors spent watching television and video games and interacting with social networks.
This IQ was based on five tasks: two on reading comprehension and vocabulary, one on attention and executive function (including working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control), one that assessed visuospatial processing (such as rotating objects in your mind), and one on the ability to learn in multiple attempts.
Intelligence is a quality influenced by environmental factors
The researchers followed around 5,000 children for two years, at which time they had psychological tests repeated, allowing them to analyze the variation in children’s performance on these tests from one session to the next, and to control for individual differences in psychological tests. the first test. Genetic variations that could affect intelligence and differences that could be related to educational factors and the economic position of the parents were also taken into account.
“Screen time doesn’t generally affect kids’ cognitive abilities, and playing video games can actually help boost intelligence.”
The results, which have been published in Scientific Reports, show that, on average, children spent 2.5 hours a day watching television, half an hour on social networks and one hour playing video games, and that in those who played more games the average how much their intelligence increased between the two measurements was about 2.5 IQ points higher than average. No significant effect, positive or negative, of watching TV or social media was recorded.
“We didn’t examine the effects of screen behavior on physical activity, sleep, well-being or school performance, so we can’t say anything about it,” said Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience of the Karolinska Institute. “But our results support the claim that screen time generally doesn’t affect children’s cognitive abilities, and that playing video games can actually help boost intelligence. This is consistent with several experimental video game studies.”
The results also support those of other recent studies that have shown that intelligence is not a constant, but is influenced by environmental factors and cognitive skills can be trained. For this reason, Klingberg has stated that they intend to study “the effects of other environmental factors and how cognitive effects are related to the development of the infant brain.”
The research has some limitations, since, for example, only children from the United States participated in it, and it did not discriminate between different types of video games, both aspects make it difficult to transfer its results to the child population of other countries with different gaming habits. In addition, both the time that minors spent in front of the screen, as well as other habits, were self-assessed and, therefore, it is also possible that there were errors in said information.
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