"The fact is, such broad claims about the cognitive benefits of video games, and by extension other digital media, have always been dubious. They stretch the truth. The mental faculties of attention and memory have many different facets - neuroscientists are still a long way from hashing them out - and to the extent that past gaming studies demonstrate improvements in these areas, they relate to gains in the kinds of attention and memory used in the fast-paced processing of a welter of visual stimuli.
A 2009 study by a different group of Iowa State researchers, published inPsychophysiology, investigated the effects of videogaming on cognitive control, through experiments with 51 young men, both heavy gamers and light gamers. The study indicated that videogaming has little effect on "reactive" cognitive control - the ability to respond to some event after it happens. But when it comes to "proactive" cognitive control - the ability to plan and adjust one's behavior in advance of an event or stimulus - videogaming has a significant negative effect. "The negative association between video game experience and proactive cognitive control," the researchers write, "is interesting in the context of recent evidence demonstrating a similar correlation between video game experience and self-reported measures of attention deficits and hyperactivity. Together, these data may indicate that the video game experience is associated with a decrease in the efficiency of proactive cognitive control that supports one’s ability to maintain goal-directed action when the environment is not intrinsically engaging." Videogamers, in other words, seem to have a difficult time staying focused on a task that doesn't involve constant incoming stimuli. Their attention wavers.
These findings are consistent with more general studies of media multitasking. In a much-cited 2009 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, Stanford's Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner show that heavy media multitaskers demonstrate significantly less cognitive control than light multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers "have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment" and are also less able to suppress irrelevant memories from intruding on their work. The heavy multitaskers were actually less efficient at switching between tasks - in other words, they were worse at multitasking.
So should people be prevented from playing video games? Not at all (though parents should monitor and restrict young kids' use of the games). Moderate game-playing probably isn't going to have any significant long-term cognitive consequences, either good or bad. Video-gaming is fun and relaxing, and those are good things. Besides, people engage in all sorts of pleasant, diverting pursuits that carry risks, from rock-climbing to beer-drinking (don't mix those two), and if we banned all of them, we'd die of boredom."
More Here from Nicholas Carr
A 2009 study by a different group of Iowa State researchers, published inPsychophysiology, investigated the effects of videogaming on cognitive control, through experiments with 51 young men, both heavy gamers and light gamers. The study indicated that videogaming has little effect on "reactive" cognitive control - the ability to respond to some event after it happens. But when it comes to "proactive" cognitive control - the ability to plan and adjust one's behavior in advance of an event or stimulus - videogaming has a significant negative effect. "The negative association between video game experience and proactive cognitive control," the researchers write, "is interesting in the context of recent evidence demonstrating a similar correlation between video game experience and self-reported measures of attention deficits and hyperactivity. Together, these data may indicate that the video game experience is associated with a decrease in the efficiency of proactive cognitive control that supports one’s ability to maintain goal-directed action when the environment is not intrinsically engaging." Videogamers, in other words, seem to have a difficult time staying focused on a task that doesn't involve constant incoming stimuli. Their attention wavers.
These findings are consistent with more general studies of media multitasking. In a much-cited 2009 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, Stanford's Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner show that heavy media multitaskers demonstrate significantly less cognitive control than light multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers "have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment" and are also less able to suppress irrelevant memories from intruding on their work. The heavy multitaskers were actually less efficient at switching between tasks - in other words, they were worse at multitasking.
So should people be prevented from playing video games? Not at all (though parents should monitor and restrict young kids' use of the games). Moderate game-playing probably isn't going to have any significant long-term cognitive consequences, either good or bad. Video-gaming is fun and relaxing, and those are good things. Besides, people engage in all sorts of pleasant, diverting pursuits that carry risks, from rock-climbing to beer-drinking (don't mix those two), and if we banned all of them, we'd die of boredom."
More Here from Nicholas Carr
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