Its an age-old question: will your child’s IQ improve if they play video games?
A May 2022 report is amongst a few that are claiming to have an answer.
Let’s dive in.
The research results have been mixed.
There are a number of reasons for this.
What about puzzle games and shooters?
Do online multiplayer games have a different impact than games played alone?
Researchers also looked at polygenic scores to account for genetic differences.
It also analyzed intelligence using five intelligence measures.
The paper further says that not only did gaming itself positively correlate, the time spent gaming positively correlated.
In other words, gaming more means greater cognitive increases.
Its okay to be suspicious.
Some of these problems are those questions we mentioned above that plague all studies of this kind.
Potential Problems With the Study
Screen time info was from survey data.
Further, survey data often face the problem of respondents filtering their answers to make themselves look better.
If parents wanted to seem cooler or stricter, they could have misreported data.
There are also problems the authors didnt mention.
The tests used to determine intelligence didnt include an IQ test.
They included word and image recognition, memory, spatial reasoning, audio response, and other similar metrics.
Arguably, the authors defined intelligence as skill at videogames and then determined that playing video games increases intelligence.
This could also explain some of their mysterious findings like why videos increased intelligence but socializing didnt.
How Have Other Researchers Approached Gaming and Intelligence?
Other similar studies have accounted for this and come up with different results regarding gaming and intelligence.
Game in Good Health
So, can playing video games improve a childs IQ?
The answer to every good yes-or-no question is sort of.
There are aspects of intelligence that video games can improve and aspects of intelligence that they cant.
Video games, like most other things in life, are healthy in moderation.
But they arent a substitute for learning.
