Playing action video games increases brain activity and decision-making skills, says new research.
Coupling neuroimaging with decision-making, investigators found that students who played video games regularly made faster and more accurate decisions vs. peers who rarely played video games.
“This has not been shown before,” investigators Mukesh Dhamala, PhD, and Timothy Jordan, PhD, both with Georgia State University in Atlanta, said in a joint email to Medscape Medical News.
“Previous neuroimaging studies have suggested that there may be a positive effect of video games on attention, visuospatial, [and] memory skills, but a clear behavior-brain relationship is lacking in the effects and decision-making processes,” the researchers added.
The results were published online June 22 in Neuroimage: Reports.
Brain Changes
The study includes 47 college students. This may interest you : 4 Effective Ways to Clear Amazon Prime Video Viewing and Search History. Of these, 28 reported action video games to play at least 5 hours a week over the previous 2 years, while the remaining “non-gamers” had less than 1 hour per week of play on average.
During functional MRI, participants were given a left-right moving points task, in which they were asked to press a button in their right or left hand to indicate that the directional points were moving – or to resist pressing either button when there was no directional movement war.
The sensorimotor decision work we used started with a color prompt (que) immediately followed by a visual display of moving points for a participant to make a decision about the movement of moving points and finally make a choice (left or right). ) with a motor response, “investigators write.
The results show that video games were about 190 milliseconds faster and 2% more accurate with their responses than peers who did not play video games.
These differences correlate with specific changes in the node and network activities in and across the linguistic gyrus, the complementary motor area, and the thalamus.
The results suggest that video game games “potentially improve some of the sub-processes for sensation, perception, and mapping on action to improve decision-making skills,” the researchers write.
Jordan said he was not surprised by the results.
As a child, he had a weak vision in an A. As part of a research study he participated in when he was about 5 years old, he covered his good eyes and played video games to strengthen his vision in the weak.
Jordan credits video game training with a helping hand from being legally blind in an eye to building a strong capacity for visual processing, allowing him to eventually play lacrosse and paintball.
“Nothing Dramatic”
Commenting for Medscape Medical News, Stephen Faraone, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Vice President of Research, Department of Psychiatry, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York, also said he was not surprised by the results. On the same subject : Amazon Prime Video Channels: See Prime Day deals and all the TV channels you can add.
“Nothing dramatic here,” said Pharaoh, who was not involved in the research.
“Playing video games can change the brain in a way that improves some cognitive abilities. The allegation is that no well-designed randomized controlled trials have documented that these improvements in cognitive ability generalize to persistent improvements in real-world outcomes such as school performance,” “, he added.
Pharaoh noted that at this point, it was also unclear what the minimum time required for video game training would be in order to gain clear benefits on decision-making skills.
Dhamala and Jordan pointed out that, as with all other things, games must be done in moderation.
“Playing too much can sometimes lead to addiction, just like anything that affects our brains, especially young people’s developing brains,” they said.
Dhamala’s laboratory at GSU is currently working on a longitudinal neuroimaging study to answer these questions.
The study was funded by grants from GSU Brain & amp; Conduct at GSU-GaTech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging. Dhamala, Jordan and Pharaohs have not reported any relevant financial relations.
Neuroimage: Reports. Published online June 22, 2022. Full text
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