There's a case to be made that video games may actually be boosting the intelligence of kids.
Over recent years researchers have started to home in on specific types of screen time and how they influence a variety of outcomes in children. The sheer heterogenous nature of digital screen use in the 21st century has made it impossible to simply state all screen time is bad.
So the very particular focus of this new research was to investigate the relationship between video game use and intelligence. To evaluate the admittedly abstract metric of “intelligence”, the researchers first accounted for socioeconomic backgrounds and the presence of genes related to intelligence.
Around 5,000 children were followed for two years. Aged between nine and 10 years at baseline, the participants completed the cognitive tests at the beginning and end of the study. Screen time was self-reported and divided into three categories: watching, socializing and gaming.
At the beginning of the study the researchers detected no association between time spent gaming and below- or above-average intelligence. Interestingly, however, high levels of watching TV and videos, or socializing online, was slightly linked to lower levels of intelligence at baseline. After two years the follow-up results were even more surprising.
“While children who played more video games at 10 years were on average no more intelligent than children who didn’t game, they showed the most gains in intelligence after two years, in both boys and girls,” write Klingberg and Sauce. “For example, a child who was in the top 17 percent in terms of hours spent gaming increased their IQ about 2.5 points more than the average child over two years.”
At follow-up social media use was not associated with any change in intelligence but watching TV or online videos could be linked to a small increase in intelligence. The researchers note this increase was too small to be statistically significant.
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