Playing video games daily can enhance cognitive skills in children: Study

The study by Adam Chie-Ming Oei and Michael Donald Patterson of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore found that playing video games can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes to those involved in the game.

In the research, non-gamer participants played five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day, five days of the week for one month. Each participant was assigned one game.

Some played games like Bejeweled where participants matched three identical objects or an agent-based virtual life simulation like The Sims, while others played action games or had to find hidden objects, as in Hidden Expedition.

After this month of 'training', the researchers found that people who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks.

Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, researchers stated that this is the first study that compared multiple video games in a single study and showed that different skills can be improved by playing different games.

The authors in journal PLOS ONE added that video games don't appear to cause a general improvement in mental abilities.

Rather like muscles that can be trained with repetitive actions, repeated use of certain cognitive processes in video games can improve performance on other tasks as well, they said.