Many parents feel guilty when their kids play video games for hours on end. Some even fear that this will make their children less intelligent. In fact, this is a topic that scientists have been battling over for years.
In our new study, we investigate how video games affect children’s minds by interviewing and testing more than 5,000 children aged 10 to 12. And the findings, published in Scientific Reports, will be surprising to some.
The children were asked how many hours a day they spent on social media, watching videos or TV and playing video games. The answer was: many hours. On average, the children spent two and a half hours a day watching videos or TV shows online, half an hour socializing online, and an hour playing video games.
In all, that’s four hours a day for the average child and six hours for the top 25 percent, a large chunk of a child’s leisure time. And other reports have found that this has increased dramatically over the decades. Screens were there in previous generations, but now they truly define childhood.
Is that a bad thing? Well, it’s complicated. There may be advantages and disadvantages for children’s developing minds. And this may depend on the output you are looking at. For our study, we were particularly interested in the effect of screen time on intelligence: the ability to learn effectively, think rationally, understand complex ideas and adapt to new situations.
(You can also read: The danger of screens as babysitters: ‘electronic cocaine’)
Intelligence is an important trait in our lives and highly predictive of a child’s future income, happiness, and longevity. In research, it is often measured as performance on a variety of cognitive tests. For our study, we created an IQ from five tasks: two on reading comprehension and vocabulary, one on attention and executive function (including working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control), one assessing visuo-spatial processing (such as rotating objects in your mind) and one on the ability to learn across multiple trials.
It’s not the first time someone has studied the effect of screens on intelligence, but the research, so far, has yielded mixed results. So what’s special about this time? What is new in our study is that we took into account genes and socioeconomic background. To date, only a few studies have considered socioeconomic status (household income, parental education, and neighborhood quality), and no studies have considered genetic effects.
Genes matter because intelligence is highly heritable. Left unexplained, these factors may be masking the true effect of screen time on children’s intelligence. For example, children born with certain genes may be more likely to watch television and have independent learning disabilities. The genetic lottery is a major confounding factor in any psychological process, but until recently this was difficult to explain in scientific studies due to the high costs of genome analysis and technological limitations.
(We suggest: the intelligence test passed by only 17%, dare you to try it?)
The results
The data we used for our study is part of a massive data collection effort in the United States to better understand child development: the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Project. The sample was representative of the United States in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
We found that when we first asked the boy at age 10 how much he gambled, both watching videos and socializing online were linked to below-average intelligence. Meanwhile, games weren’t related to intelligence at all. These screen time results are mostly in line with previous research. But when we followed up later, we found that the game had a significant and positive effect on intelligence.
While the kids who played the most video games at age 10 weren’t smarter on average than the kids who didn’t, they showed the greatest gains in intelligence after two years, in both boys and girls. For example, a child who was in the top 17% in terms of hours spent playing increased their IQ by about 2.5 points more than the average child in two years.
(Read on: Unicef: 16.5 million children in Latin America will need help in 2023)
This is evidence of a beneficial and causal effect of video games on intelligence. This finding fits with previous smaller studies, where participants were randomly assigned to play video games or a control group. Our finding is also in line with parallel lines of studies suggesting that cognitive skills are not fixed, but can be trained, including studies with intervention applications of cognitive training.
What about the other two types of on-screen activity? Social networks have not affected the change in intelligence after two years. The many hours of Instagram and messages didn’t increase the boys’ intelligence, but it wasn’t harmful either. Finally, watching television and online videos showed a positive effect in one of the analyses, but no effect when parental education was taken into account (as opposed to the broader factor of ‘socioeconomic status’). So this finding should be taken with a grain of salt. There is some empirical support that high-quality television and video content, such as Sesame Street, has a positive effect on children’s academic achievement and cognitive abilities. But these results are rare.
When thinking about the implications of these findings, it’s important to keep in mind that there are many other psychological aspects that we haven’t considered, such as mental health, sleep quality and exercise. Our findings shouldn’t be taken as a blanket recommendation for all parents to allow for unlimited play. But for those parents upset about their kids playing video games, you can now feel better knowing you’re probably making them a little smarter.
TORKEL KLINGBERG
Y BROWN SAUCE (**)
The conversation (***)
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute.
