Play on? Video games may actually help boost your brain: London researchers

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Video games may boost your brainpower, but don’t expect them to improve your mental health, a new study by Western University researchers says.

The research is part of Western’s Brain and Body Study, a collaboration with Science and Industry Museum for the Manchester Science Festival. The online study, which analyzed cognition and its links to lifestyle factors, included about 1,000 participants from around the world.

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“There’s no question that physical exercise is good for people,” Western neuroscientist and study author Adrian Owen said. “But I think people should maybe stop dismissing video games as being something that’s perhaps a waste of time.

“There may be some role for these complex, modern video games in teaching people how to think about problem solving.”

Study participants completed a survey that asked questions about their lifestyle – including exercise habits and time spent playing video games. They were then asked to do a series of online tasks to measure memory, attention, reasoning and verbal abilities.

Among the approximately 1,000 people who finished all the tasks, playing video games was linked to a positive effect cognition, but was not linked to improved mental health.  

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The opposite was true for participants who reported exercising more than 150 minutes a week. Exercise was linked to better mental health, but not improved cognitive performance on the tasks, the study said.  

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The research paper used cognitive performance tests from Creyos, a health care software company in which Owen is the chief scientific officer.  

The 12 cognitive tasks administered to study participants tested various aspects of thinking, including working memory, attention, verbal and spatial short-term memory, planning and deductive reasoning. 

The majority of the study participants, about 77 per cent, were from the United Kingdom. Thirteen per cent were from Canada. About a third of the group were retirees and about 83 per cent of the participants had a post-secondary education.  

In the study, infrequent gamers were defined as people who played up to three hours a week. Regular gamers were participants who played more than three hours a week, Owen said. 

“The more people played video games, the more likely they were to have improved memory, improved concentration and improved reasoning abilities,” Owen said.“Even the people who only played video games a few hours a week were better on these tasks than people who played more video games.” 

In the future, the research team would like to examine what type of video games provide the most cognitive benefits, Owen said. 

“Is it shoot-em-up games, or is it adventure games? It’s hard to answer. Most people in the sample, when we asked them, reported playing multiple types of video games,” he said. 

“Our hypothesis is that (it’s) games that require solving puzzles, finding the solutions to problems, working your way through different situations that are producing this improvement in cognition.”  

The study, Characterizing the Cognitive and Mental Health Benefits of Exercise and Video Game Playing, is in pre-print and is in the process of being peer-reviewed. 

jbieman@postmedia.com

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