During the past ten years, several investigations and news media reports have indicated that action video games such as Medal of Honor or Unreal Tournament enhance a wide range of perceptual and cognitive abilities. However Walter Boot an assistant professor in Florida State University’s Department of Psychology critically reevaluates those claims in a report published this week in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

In collaboration with Daniel Blakely an FSU psychology doctoral student and University of Illinois collaborator Daniel Simons, Boot presents what he considers to be a convincing argument in that a great deal of the research done over the past ten years demonstrating the benefits of playing video games is basically flawed.

Boot explained:

“Despite the hype, in reality there is little solid evidence that games enhance cognition at all.”

They argue that many influential investigations who support the superior skills of action video gamers suffer from an array of methodological flaws. Several of those investigations compared the cognitive skills to those who frequently played video games to non-gamers and discovered gamers to be superior. Though Boot and his coauthors mention that just because an individual plays games frequently it doesn’t necessarily mean that it caused better perceptual and cognitive abilities, it may be that people who have these abilities may just be simply drawn to video games.

Often ads are put up in college campuses by researchers in order to recruit “expert” gamers to look at the cognitive differences between expert and novice players. Boot explains: “That wording alone lets participants know how researchers expect them to perform on challenging, often game-like computer tests of cognition.”

According to Boot and his colleagues, media reports that cover the advanced skills of gamers increases gamers awareness of these expectations. Even investigations in which non-gamers are trained to play action video games have their own problems, usually in the form of weak control groups.

Because he grew up playing video games, Boot explained at the beginning he was thrilled about research that stated playing action videos games may improve basic measures of attention. Together with his coauthors they conducted their own video-game training investigation to find out what other abilities might improve after playing video games, but they were not able to mirror the training benefits discovered in prior investigations.

Boot said:

“The idea that video games could enhance cognition was exciting because it represented one of the few cases in which cognitive training enhanced abilities that weren’t directly practiced. But we found no benefits of video game training.” Not only did some of his studies fail to replicate previous findings, but “no study has yet met the ‘gold standard’ methods necessary in intervention studies of this sort.”

In reality, certain methodological problems arose again and again in the investigations that Boot and Blakely reviewed. Even more important than identifying flaws of previous studies, Blakely said: “their new paper outlines a series of best practices for researchers who want definitive answers on the potential benefits of video game play.”

They haven’t entirely written off video games as a method to enhance perceptual and cognitive abilities, they are actually still open to the possibility. However they say that more evidence is needed before they begin recommending video game interventions as a way to boost perception and cognition for kids, adults and senior citizens.

Boot stated:

“If people are playing games to improve their cognition, they may be wasting their time. Play games because you enjoy them, not because they could boost your brain power.”

Written by Grace Rattue