Parents often worry in regards to the harmful impacts of video games on their children, from mental health and social problems to missing out on exercise.

But a big recent US study published in JAMA Network Open on Monday indicates there might also be cognitive advantages related to the favored pastime.

Lead creator Bader Chaarani, an assistant professor of psychiatry on the University of Vermont, told AFP he was naturally drawn to the subject as a keen gamer himself with expertise in neuroimagery.

Prior research had focused on detrimental effects, linking gaming with depression and increased aggression.

These studies were nevertheless limited by their relatively small variety of participants, particularly those involving brain imaging, said Charaani.

For the brand new research, Chaarani and colleagues analyzed data from the massive and ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

They checked out survey answers, cognitive test results, and brain images from around 2,000 nine- and ten-year-olds, who were separated into two groups: those that never played games, and those that played for 3 hours or more a day.

This threshold was chosen because it exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines of 1 or two hours of video games for older children.

Each group was assessed in two tasks.

The primary involved seeing arrows pointing left or right, with the youngsters asked to press left or right as fast as they may.

They were also told to not press anything in the event that they saw a “stop” signal, to measure how well they may control their impulses.

Within the second task, they were shown people’s faces, after which asked if a subsequent picture shown afterward matched or not, in a test of their working memory.

After using statistical methods to manage for variables that might skew results, reminiscent of parental income, IQ, and mental health symptoms, the team found the video gamers performed consistently higher on each tasks.

As they performed the tasks, the youngsters’s brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Video gamers’ brains showed more activity in regions related to attention and memory.

“The outcomes raise the intriguing possibility that video gaming may provide a cognitive training experience with measurable neurocognitive effects,” the authors concluded of their paper.

Right away it is not possible to know whether higher cognitive performance drives more gaming, or is its result, said Chaarani.

The team hope to get a more clear answer because the study continues and they appear again at the identical children at older ages.

This will even help exclude other potential aspects at play reminiscent of the youngsters’s home environment, exercise and sleep quality.

Future studies could also profit from knowing what genres of games the youngsters were playing — though at age 10 children are likely to favor motion games like Fortnite or Assassin’s Creed.

“After all, excessive use of screen time is bad for overall mental health and physical activity,” said Chaarani.

But he said the outcomes showed video games is likely to be a greater use of screen time than watching videos on YouTube, which has no discernible cognitive effects.