The brain can be affected by just 1 hour of playing video games, according to new research published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Researchers suggest that gaming for just 1 hour may boost attention.
The
study
— which was conducted by scientists from the University of Electronic
Science and Technology of China in Chengdu — found that participants who
spent 1 hour playing the video game
League of Legends experienced changes in brain activity.
The participants also demonstrated improved ability to focus on relevant information while screening out distractions.
The researchers recruited 29 male students to participate in the study. One group had at least 2 years of playing action video games and the other group had fewer than 6 months of experience playing these
video games.
The group with the most experienced, or the "experts," were ranked in the top 7 percent of
League of Legends players. The "non-experts," meanwhile, were ranked in the bottom 11 percent.
The players' "visual selective attention" was assessed by the researchers before and after playing
League of Legends.
Visual selective attention is how scientists refer to the brain's
ability to focus while simultaneously disregarding less relevant
information.
Focusing on relevant information in this way uses up brainpower, so
scientists tend to believe that people who are very good at focusing
their attention while filtering out distractions show a very efficient
use of their brains.
Video game boosted brain activity, attention
The study authors measured visual selective attention with a test
involving squares that flashed on different parts of a computer screen.
First, participants were briefly shown a square in the center of the
screen, which was followed by a square flashing elsewhere on the screen.
The participants had to then tell the scientists where on the screen
the second square was, relative to the first square.
The participants' brain activity was also monitored during the visual
selective attention test using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine.
Before playing the video game, the expert participants were found to
have stronger visual selective attention than the non-experts, and their
EEG results showed more attention-related brain activity.
After playing
League of Legends for 1 hour, both groups demonstrated improved visual selective attention, even reporting similar scores in the post-game test.
Not only that, but the researchers found that brain activity of the non-experts increased after playing the game, to the extent that levels of brain activity between experts and non-experts
were now comparable.
Although the findings demonstrate a measurable increase in both brain
activity and visual selective attention scores in participants after
playing a video game for 1 hour, the authors explain that their findings
do not tell us about how long these effects might last. They therefore
suggest that more studies are needed in this regard.
It is worth noting, as well,
that this study was conducted in a very small group of participants —
just 29 men — so its results should be interpreted with caution.
New findings add to growing evidence
Some previous studies have also found that action video games such as
Halo and
Call of Duty may improve visual attention.
A
2010 review
of the available research, for example, suggested that playing video
games may be beneficial for improving focus in military training and
education.
As Bjorn Hubert-Wallander, the lead author of that review explained,
"Visual attention is crucial to preventing sensory overload, since the the brain is constantly faced with an overwhelming amount of visual
information."
"It's an ability," he said, "that is especially emphasized during
visually demanding activities such as driving a car or searching for a
friend's face in a crowd, so it is not surprising that scientists have
long been interested in ways to modify, extend, and enhance the
different facets of visual attention."
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