Any form of screen time is often considered to have a negative impact on children's development, but a new study by the European research group presents a surprisingly different case, which provides evidence that playing video games may actually improve children's intelligence. Although the impact of television or video games on adolescent development has been studied for decades, the digital landscape of the past decade has greatly reshaped children's relationship with the screen.
This means that screen time now spans many different activities, including socializing with friends on smartphone apps, watching TV, playing video games and even doing school homework on laptops.
In recent years, researchers have begun to study specific types of screen time and how they affect children's outcomes. In the 21st century, the pure heterogeneity of digital screen use makes it impossible to simply say that all screen time is bad.
Therefore, the special focus of this new study is to investigate the relationship between video game use and intelligence. In order to evaluate the accepted Abstract index of "intelligence", the researchers first considered the socio-economic background and the existence of genes related to intelligence.
"In our study, we created an intelligence index from five tasks: two on reading comprehension and vocabulary, one on attention and executive functions (including working memory, flexible thinking and self-control), one on assessing visuospatial processing (such as rotating objects in your mind), and one on learning ability through multiple experiments." Torkel Klingberg and Bruno sauce, two researchers involved in the study, explained.
About 5000 children were followed for two years. Their baseline age was between 9 and 10 years, and participants completed cognitive tests at the beginning and end of the study. Screen time is self-reported and falls into three categories: viewing, social networking and games.
At the beginning of the study, the researchers found no correlation between time spent on games and below - or above average intelligence. Interestingly, however, high levels of TV and video viewing or online social networking were slightly associated with lower levels of intelligence at baseline. The follow-up results two years later were even more surprising.
Klingberg and sauce wrote: "although children who played more video games in 10 years were on average no smarter than children who did not play games, they showed the most intellectual growth after two years, both boys and girls. For example, a child who ranked in the top 17% in terms of game time had an IQ improvement of about 2.5 points over ordinary children in two years."
In follow-up, the use of social media has nothing to do with any change in intelligence, but watching TV or online video may be related to a small increase in intelligence. The researchers noted that the increase was too small to be statistically significant.
Klinberg cautiously emphasized the limitations of his team's findings. The focus of this study is very narrow, only examining a few indicators of intelligence. So this study cannot show that these types of screen time have no effect on other important factors such as sleep, school performance or physical activity.
"But our results support the claim that screen time generally does not damage children's cognitive ability, and that playing video games can actually help improve intelligence. This is consistent with several experimental studies on playing video games," Klingberg said.
Another limitation of the study is that all forms of video game use are rolled into a homogeneous whole, from smartphone games to first person shooter games on game consoles. Therefore, it is unclear whether specific types of video games are more cognitive than other games.
These findings are certainly consistent with a growing number of studies that have found that different types of screen time have some benefits for children. A study last year found a convincing link between using video games and increasing mental health, while another recent study found a link between time spent on social media applications and children's larger friendship groups.
Of course, all these findings do not suggest that it is healthy for children to have unlimited screen time. But they do emphasize the complexity of the screen time problem and show that not all screen use can be harmful.
Klingberg and sauce concluded: "our results should not be seen as a package of recommendations for all parents to allow unlimited games. But for parents who are worried about their children playing video games, you can rest assured now because you know it may make them smarter."