Friday 13 May 2022 04:41 PM Playing video games can help boost children's intelligence - unlike watching TV! trends now
Many parents feel guilty when their children spend hours on end staring at screens – and some even worry it could make them less clever.
But a new study suggests that spending an above-average time playing video games can actually help boost children's intelligence.
Researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden carried out psychological tests on more than 5,000 children in the US aged between ten and 12, to gauge their general cognitive abilities.
The children and their parents were also asked about how much time the children spent watching TV and videos, playing video games and engaging with social media.
The researchers then followed up with the children two years later, at which point they were asked to repeat the psychological tests.
The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence by approximately 2.5 IQ points more than the average between the two measurements.
No significant effect was observed, positive or negative, of TV-watching or social media.
Children who played more games than the average increased their intelligence by approximately 2.5 IQ points more than the average over two years
'While children who played more video games at ten years were on average no more intelligent than children who didn't game, they showed the most gains in intelligence after two years,' said Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.
'For example, a child who was in the top 17 per cent in terms of hours spent gaming increased their IQ about 2.5 points more than the average child over two years.
'This is evidence of a beneficial, causal effect of video games on intelligence.'
For the study, the researchers created an intelligence index from five tasks: two on reading comprehension and vocabulary, one on attention and executive function , one assessing visual-spatial processing, and one on learning ability.
Repeating the psychological tests two years apart enabled the researchers to study how
