Friday, September 16, 2011
Video Games May Not Boost Cognition
Wouldn’t it be nice if all those hours kids spent glued to their PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or Nintendo DS video games actually resulted in something tangible? Better grades, perhaps? Improved concentration? Superior driving skills?
Over the past decade, many studies and news media reports have suggested that action video games such as Medal of Honor or Unreal Tournament improve a variety of perceptual and cognitive abilities. But in a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (http://www.frontiersin.org/psychology), Walter Boot, an assistant professor in Florida State University’s Department of Psychology, critically reevaluates those claims.
Together with FSU psychology doctoral student Daniel Blakely and University of Illinois collaborator Daniel Simons, Boot lays out what he believes is a persuasive argument that much of the work done over the past decade demonstrating the benefits of video game play is fundamentally flawed.
“Despite the hype, in reality, there is little solid evidence that games enhance cognition at all,” he said.
The authors make the case that a number of influential studies supporting the superior skills of action gamers suffer from a host of methodological flaws. Many of those studies compared the cognitive skills of frequent gamers to non-gamers and found gamers to be superior. However, Boot and his coauthors point out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that their game experience caused better perceptual and cognitive abilities. It could be that individuals who have the abilities required to be successful gamers are simply drawn to gaming.
Researchers looking for cognitive differences between expert and novice gamers often recruit research participants by circulating ads on college campuses seeking “expert” video game players. That wording alone, Boot argues, “lets participants know how researchers expect them to perform on challenging, often game-like computer tests of cognition.”
Media reports on the superior skills of gamers heighten gamers’ awareness of these expectations. Even studies in which non-gamers are trained to play action video games have their own problems, often in the form of weak control groups, according to Boot and his coauthors.
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