Those sessions on Fortnite are probably making your kids smarter.
Video games get a lot of stick.
A hundred-billion-dollar industry that dwarfs the film sector, they’re nevertheless still seen by the moral majority as the obscure vice of young, disaffected men that causes them (when white) to commit mass shootings and other violent acts.
Well, one thing you can’t blame video games for, it seems, is making kids stupid.
Researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have studied the link between screen habits and intelligence over time, by giving 9000 US nine-year-olds a battery of intelligence tests and measuring how long they spent on three kinds of screen time: watching (TV and videos), socialising and gaming. They controlled for the subjects’ socioeconomic status and genetic predisposition for intelligence.
At baseline, more time on watching and socialising negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. When they looked at gender differences, they found more intelligent girls played video games slightly more.
After two years they followed up with 5000 of the kids and found that those who had spent more time gaming at the age of nine gained the most in intelligence, while socialising made no significant difference. More surprisingly, watching also produced gains, although these were non-significant when parental education, rather than socioeconomic status, was adjusted for.
The team only counted time spent gaming, not expertise – but they cite a previous study that found expertise was also positively correlated with intelligence.
The authors suggest the cognitive impacts of watching videos and playing games might partially explain the Flynn effect: the worldwide increase in intelligence scores over the years. As they put it, the “iterative and reciprocal development of technologically driven cognitive skills is exactly the kind of process one would expect given the gradual but constant rise in measured intelligence scores over the twentieth century. And it’s probably not a coincidence that the introduction of video games and computer technologies in the 1970s and 1980s coincides with a slight but discernible uptick in the measured rate of increase in IQ scores.”
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