Video Gaming in School Children: How Much Is Enough?

Is video gaming a good thing for children? For some parent video gaming is the only thing that their child does while for other parents that is not one of the options in their child’s life. For the most part video gaming is not good or bad it just depends on the way that people see it. At a neural level, structural and functional brain changes associated with gaming use were most evident with respect to basal ganglia circuitry. It was shown in a study that playing video games for 1 hour per week was associated with faster and more consistent psychomotor responses to visual stimulation, while negative implications were clearly visible only in children at the extreme of our game-playing distribution, with 9 hours or more of video gaming per week. It was also stated that neuroimaging research now suggests that training with desktop virtual environments is also capable of modulating brain systems that support procedural learning. No matter how many studies are done parents are still going to allow their kids to play video games knowing that it will affect them later on in life.

 

                                         Reference:

Pujol, Fenoll, Forns, Harrison, Martínez‐Vilavella, Macià, . . . Sunyer. (2016). Video gaming in school children: How much is enough? Annals of Neurology, 80(3), 424-433.