{"id":14112,"date":"2011-09-19T09:52:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T07:52:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"video-games-probably-don-t-actually-make-you-smarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/14112-video-games-probably-don-t-actually-make-you-smarter","title":{"rendered":"Video games probably don't actually make you smarter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not only do we love playing games, but we love reading about studies which indicate that playing them has broader positive implications for us, such as increasing problem solving abilities, reflexes, or just about any other psychological or cognitive function.<\/p>\n

In fact there have been a variety of exactly these kinds of studies published over the past few years.<\/p>\n

However, a new study recently conducted suggests that there is no reason to believe that playing games has any positive effects.<\/p>\n

Published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology<\/a>, the study conducted by psychologists Walter R. Boot, Daniel P. Blakely and Daniel J. Simons claims that various methodological problems found in previous studies on the matter call their findings into question.<\/p>\n

“The conclusion that game training produces unusually broad transfer is weakened by methodological shortcomings common to most (if not all) of the published studies documenting gaming effects. The flaws we discuss are not obscure or esoteric—they are well known pitfalls in the design of clinical trials and experiments on expertise. Most of these shortcomings are surmountable, but no published gaming study has successfully avoided them all.”<\/p>\n

One of the biggest problems found is that most of the tests conducted call in regular gamers to participate. The study claims that “expert gamers” are more motivated to perform well to show that their hobby does in fact improve their cognitive and perceptual abilities. Therefore, “Any difference in task performance, then, would be analogous to a placebo effect.”<\/p>\n

The solution to this problem is to recruit participants without mentioning video games.<\/p>\n

Another issue raised by the study is that while gamers often performed better in the tests, this may not be because they are smarter, but simply because they are better at taking tests.<\/p>\n

“Changes in how people approach a task are interesting and important, but without careful evaluation of strategy shifts, better expert performance might wrongly be attributed to more fundamental differences in perception and memory.”<\/p>\n

The study doesn’t actually go so far as to say that games don’t improve our cognitive functioning, but rather that the studies conducted so far are flawed, and we can’t really draw any meaningful conclusions from them.<\/p>\n

Video games probably don’t actually make you smarter<\/strong><\/a> << Comments and views<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Study published which claims previous studies are all flawed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}