Does Playing Casual Video Games Improve Cognitive Skills?
Training with casual video games designed to test working memory and reasoning improved players' divided attention skills, but did not boost other mental abilities like memory or general intelligence.
Source
Cognitive training with casual video games: points to consider
What they did
Researchers recruited 209 young adults and randomly assigned them to one of four groups: two training groups playing casual games focused on working memory and reasoning, an active control group playing casual games with low cognitive demand, and a passive no-contact control group. Participants in the training groups completed 10 sessions of game play, playing four games for ~20 min each per session. Before and after the training, all participants completed cognitive tests.
What they found
Both groups that practiced working memory and reasoning games showed significant improvements in a composite measure of divided attention compared to the control groups. However, this training did not produce any significant improvements in general fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, episodic memory, or perceptual speed. Interestingly, individuals with lower initial reasoning abilities showed the largest improvements in divided attention from the cognitive game training.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study only tested healthy young adults between the ages 18 and 30, meaning the findings may not apply to other cohorts like children or older adults. Additionally, playing casual video games for 15 h did not improve most aspects of cognition, which indicates that this training period may have been too short to change stable traits like fluid intelligence. Because the researchers did not perform follow-up tests, it is also unclear if the small gains in divided attention persist over time.
Key terms
- fluid intelligence
- The capacity to think logically and solve novel problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge.
- working memory
- A cognitive system that temporarily stores and manipulates information needed for complex tasks like reasoning and learning.
- divided attention
- The mental ability to focus on and process multiple tasks, stimuli, or activities at the same time.
- active control group
- A group of participants who engage in an activity that mimics the experimental training but lacks the critical active ingredient being tested.
- transfer of training
- The effect that learning or practicing one task has on the performance of a different, untrained task.
- perceptual speed
- The speed and accuracy with which a person can compare, identify, and process visual patterns and information.
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Quiz yourself
According to skill acquisition research, what characteristics should a cognitive training program have to lead to broader learning?
Common questions
Did the game training make participants generally smarter?
No, the study found no improvements in fluid intelligence or general memory. The benefits of the training were specific to divided attention, which involves managing multiple tasks or targets at once.
What is the difference between the two working memory and reasoning groups (WM-REAS 1 and 2)?
In the WM-REAS 2 group, the difficulty of the games was adaptive across sessions, meaning players started each new session at the level where they previously finished. In contrast, three out of four games for the WM-REAS 1 group reset to level one at the beginning of each session.
How do we know the improvements weren't just a placebo effect?
The researchers included an active control group that played different casual games. Although this active control group reported similar expectations of improvement, they did not show the same gains in divided attention as the reasoning groups.
Who benefited the most from playing these cognitive games?
The study showed that individuals who started with lower baseline reasoning abilities experienced the greatest improvements in divided attention after training.
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