Do Video Games Make You Smarter? Maybe Not.

Video game players like to think that their hobby has benefits beyond entertainment –that even though they appear to be sitting and staring at a screen, they’re actually fine tuning reflexes, developing problem-solving abilities, and improving visual acuity.

It’s a compelling idea, and it has some science behind it. Over the past ten years, a number of studies have shown that video game players often outperform non-gamers on measures of perception and cognition, and that video game practice can enhance those abilities.

But a new study suggests the jury is still out on video games. In a paper recently published as Do Action Video Games Improve Perception and Cognition? in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, psychologistsWalter R. Boot, Daniel P. Blakely and Daniel J. Simons suggest that methodological problems call earlier studies into question, and leave the relationship between games and cognition unclear.

The authors write:

"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."

One way gaming studies have stumbled is by specifically seeking out gamers to participate: Essentially, gamers perform better on cognitive tests because they’ve heard that gamers perform better on cognitive tests.

"Imagine that you are recruited to participate in a study because of your gaming expertise, and the study consists of gamelike computer tasks. If you know you have been recruited because you are an expert, the demand characteristics of the experimental situation will motivate you to try to perform well. In contrast, a non-gamer selected without any mention of gaming will not experience such demand characteristics, so will be less motivated. Any difference in task performance, then, would be analogous to a placebo effect."

The solution, say the authors, is to recruit participants without mention of video games, and to make sure that subjects don’t have any reason to link their gaming expertise to the tasks in the study.

Another frequent methodological miscue: Assuming that gamers test better because of improved cognition, not because they’re better at taking tests.

"Game benefits might reflect shifts in strategy rather than changes in more basic cognitive or perceptual capacities. Short-term and long-term game exposure does appear to produce strategy changes. For example, experienced gamers search more thoroughly than non-gamers, leading to better change detection performance. 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."

None of this means that games don’t improve cognition, or that further study isn’t warranted; just that researchers need to do a better job eliminating alternative explanations for their results.

Ultimately, say the authors, games holds tremendous promise if the evidence bears out: “Such definitive tests could have implications well beyond the laboratory, potentially helping researchers to develop game interventions to address disorders of vision and attention, and help remediate the effects of cognitive aging.”