Good news for parents with concerns about the negative cognitive health impacts of daily video game playing. New research finds there’s potential benefits for pre-teen video game players. The study was study conducted at the University of Vermont in Burlington & sponsored by the Nat’l Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The Vermont researchers examined cognitive & brain-imaging data of nearly two-thousand nine-and 10-year-olds participating in an adolescent cognizant development study. Subjects of the study were divided into two groups; those who never played video games & those who played three hours or more a day. Turns out that the dexterous youth who play video games three hours or more a day performed better in cognitive skills tests for impulse control & working memory than kids who never play at all. Scientists found that the video gamers were faster & more accurate at the tasks than the non-players. A number of studies have looked at the relationship between video gaming & cognitive behavior. Still, only a handful of neuroimaging studies have addressed this topic but the sample sizes in those studies were small, with fewer than 80 participants. With a lot of published work saying that video games are associated with negative mental health & cognitive outcomes, these latest findings may allay some of those legacy concerns. In the meantime, researchers of this study say they’ll follow participants into their 20s to determine if these advantages continue as the kids age.
