You probably heard conflicting reports about how video games affect your kid’s brain. One study will suggest that video games help us learn; another might imply that they make young people more aggressive.
How games impact your child’s mind is not an either-or proposition. Video games can have both positive and negative consequences. The question remaining is, which of these games do researchers find depends on what they are testing. Researchers focus their investigations on five attributes of video game design to bring out these disparate effects.
Video gamers, parents, politicians and the press often lionize or attack video games, which opens the door to spin that change our understanding of how these games affect people. The European Parliament has been debating whether to limit children’s access to video games. In a press statement about the report that resulted from its deliberations, the parliament concluded that games could have harmful effects on the minds of children.
Psychologists and neuroscientists conducting well-designed studies are beginning to shed light on the actual effects of video games. These studies show a clear trend: Games have many consequences in the brain, and most are not obvious. They happen at a level that overt behaviors do not immediately reflect. Since the effects are subtle, many people think video games are simply benign entertainment.
Research projects of variable strength have substantiated claims of both beneficial and harmful effects. Too often the discussion ends in a good versus evil battle, reminiscent of the plots of the violent video games themselves.
Video games may teach us skills or desensitize us to hostility. Well-designed video games are natural instructors. They supply contiguous feedback on the player’s achievement by distributing reinforcements and punishments, assisting in learning at different rates, and offer chances to drill to the point of skillfulness. Video games also can conform themselves to one-on-one learners and train players in a way that assist them transfer knowledge or skills to reality. Gamers repeat actions as they play, and repetition is one precondition to strengthening of brain to cell connections called synapses on which through repeated use that is thought to underlie memory storage and learning.
Well-designed video games are natural instructors.
Several lines of research proposes that playing video games can contribute to different types of benefits. A 2002 report in United States Department of Education presented evidence on the effectiveness of educational games. One neuroscience study, published in Nature, showed that playing action video games can meliorate visual attention to the periphery of a computer screen. Another study, which appeared in Nature Neuroscience, demonstrated that action games can improve adults’ abilities to make fine discriminations among different shades of gray called contrast sensitivity, which is important for activities such as driving at night. Other research suggests that games requiring teamwork help people develop collaboration skills.
Various types of reports provided evidence on video games that include has good social behavior content, depicting characters help each other in non-violent ways. Such content desirable conduct outside of game play. One study utilized 161 college students randomly assigned to play one of several violent or pro-social games, in which helpful behavior was required. Post activity, the students completed a task in which they could either help or hurt another student. Apparently, those who had played the violent games were more hurtful to other students, whereas those who had played the pro-social games were more helpful.
Photo by philcampbell
