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 Children who limit gaming time to an hour or two a week, however,
may experience cognitive benefits such as faster responses to visual
cues.
“It is a fact that our children expend a relevant proportion of
their time in front of a screen, which may be good and even
necessary,” said lead study author Dr. Jesus Pujol of the Hospital
del Mar in Barcelona.
“Nevertheless, a time limit is arguably recommendable, as is the
combination of gaming with physical or outdoor activity and the
supervision of video gaming’s potential effects on children's
socialization,” Pujol added by email.
To examine how the amount of time playing video games impacts kids,
Pujol and colleagues examined data on 2,442 children in Barcelona,
ages 7 to 11. The average age was about 9.
They excluded kids they described as “extreme gamers” who played at
least 18 hours a week. The study did include 428 children who were
described by their parents as non-gamers.
At the start of the study, researchers asked parents to estimate how
much time their child spent playing video games on an average
weekday and weekend.
On average, the gamers played about four hours a week, researchers
report in the Annals of Neurology.
Boys typically spent about 1.7 hours more per week playing video
games than girls, the study also found.
Overall, video gamers didn’t exhibit more behavior problems than
non-gamers.
But the more time kids spent playing, the more likely parents were
to report behavior and conduct problems, the study found.
Children who played at least nine hours a week were significantly
more likely to have poor conduct than kids who spent less time with
video games.
Researchers also checked children’s motor response speed, attention
and working memory.
Just an hour a week of gaming was enough for children to have
significantly faster motor response speed than non-gamers, though
the improvement leveled off after two hours of gaming.
They didn’t find a difference in attention or memory skills between
gamers and non-gamers, however.
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Researchers also did MRI scans of a subset of 260 children one year
after initial assessments and found gamers had functional brain
changes that weren’t seen in non-gamers.
Brain changes in the gamers were most pronounced in what’s known as
the basal ganglia, circuitry that is involved in involuntary
movements.
One limitation of the study is its reliance on parents to accurately
report how much time their children spend playing video games and
its use of a single point in time for assessing how much kids
played, the authors note.
The study is observational, and doesn’t prove video games directly
cause improvements in motor skills or increased conduct problems,
the authors also point out. The wide variety of games kids played
also might make it hard to draw broad conclusions about potential
benefits or harms of certain types of gaming.
“This study, like many others similar to it, is provocative in
suggesting both positive and negative impacts of video game playing
and how this is impacted by the amount of time devoted to game
play,” said Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscience researcher at the
University of California, San Francisco who wasn’t involved in the
study.
“It does not tell us whether video games directly influence kids'
skills or behaviors,” Gazzaley added by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2cuqXcq Annals of Neurology, online August 22,
2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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