July 28, 2022 – Playing action video games appears to increase brain activity and decision-making skills.
In a study that combined brain imaging with a decision-making task, college students who regularly played video games made faster and more accurate decisions than their peers who rarely played video games.
“The vast majority of our youth play video games for more than 3 hours per week, but the beneficial effects on decision-making skills and the brain are not fully understood,” Mukesh Dhamala, lead researcher at Georgia State University Neuroscience. Institute, he said in a news release.
The new study begins to shed light on how playing video games can change the brain to improve task performance, said Dhamala and GSU researcher Dr. Timothy Jordan.
The researchers recruited 47 college students: 28 of whom reported playing action video games for at least 5 hours per week in the past 2 years, while 19 non-gamers spent an average of less than 1 hour per week.
During brain imaging, they were given a computer-aided decision-making task. They were asked to press a button on the right or left hand to indicate the direction in which the dots were moving or to refrain from pressing a button if there was no movement.
Video gamers were faster and more accurate with their responses than non-gamers. The players also had stronger activity in some parts of the brain.
“This has not been shown before,” say Dhamala and Jordan.
Previous brain imaging studies have suggested that video games may have benefits on attention, visual perception, and memory, but a clear link to brain-behavior and effects on decision-making processes has been lacking.
Jordan was not surprised by the results of the study.
As a child, he had weak vision in one eye. When he was about 5 years old, as part of a study, he covered his good eye and played video games to strengthen his weak vision.
Jordan’s training in video games helped his brain build a strong ability to process what he saw, eventually allowing him to play lacrosse and paintball.
Stephen Faraone, Ph.D., of the State University of New York School of Medicine in Syracuse, is also not surprised by the findings.
“Playing video games can change the brain in a way that improves certain cognitive abilities,” he says after seeing the results.
The caveat, he says, is that no well-designed clinical trials have shown that these brain changes lead to improvements in real-world skills, like school performance.
It is also unclear how long video game training is required to acquire new decision-making skills.
“Like everything else, it should be done in moderation. Sometimes, like anything that affects our brains, especially developing young brains, overdoing it can become addictive,” say Dhamala and Jordan.
