Video games make you smarter?

Kids who play video games have better memory and better control over their motor skills than kids who don’t, according to a new study looking at adolescent brain function. A study has found that gamers have better performance on some tests of brain function than non-gamers.

TThis study is the latest in a series of investigations that explore whether video games can be used to treat cognitive problems. “This adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development,” said Nora Volkow, director of National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), “especially among individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.”

The study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which launched in 2018 and is tracking brain development in thousands of children in the United States as they grow into adulthood. Participants periodically go through a battery of assessments, including brain imaging, cognitive tasks and health exams. To study video games and cognition, the research team on this new study pulled from the first set of these tests—making it one part in a series that began years ago and will continue to be analyzed as the children in the study become young adults.

The researchers first looked at data from 1,492 participants between 12 and 16 years old (mean age 14). They found that those who played video games for less than an hour per week had higher scores on a battery of cognitive tests than those who didn’t play at all—about one point higher on average.

It included data on 2,217 children who were nine and 10 years old. The ABCD study asked participants how many hours of video games they played on a typical weekday or weekend day. The research team divided the group into two groups: those who played video games at least 21 hours per week, and those who did not play any video games at all.

Researchers did not include kids who played video games occasionally in the study. Then, they looked at how well the children performed on tests designed to measure attention, impulse control and memory.