Playing video game causes no harm to cognitive abilities: Study
New research findings call into question parents' long-held beliefs that children who spend hours upon hours playing video games or chose games of certain genres, will have negative effects on their cognitive abilities.
"Our studies turned up no such links, regardless of how long the children played and what types of games they chose," said Jie Zhang, associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Houston College of Education and a member of the research team. The work is published in the Journal of Media Psychology.
In reaching the conclusions, researchers examined the video gaming habits of 160 diverse urban public-school preteen students (70 per cent from lower-income households), which represents an age group less studied in previous research. Participating students reported playing video games an average of 2.5 hours daily, with the group's heaviest gamers putting in as much as 4.5 hours each day.
The team looked for an association between the students' video game play and their performance on the standardized Cognitive Ability Test 7, known as CogAT, which evaluates verbal, quantitative and nonverbal/spatial skills. CogAT was chosen as a standard measure, in contrast to the teacher-reported grades or self-reported learning assessments that previous research projects have relied on.
"Overall, neither duration of play nor choice of video game genres had significant correlations with the CogAT measures. That result shows no direct linkage between video game playing and cognitive performance, despite what had been assumed," said May Jadalla, professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University and the study's principal investigator.
But the study revealed another
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