Though video games are increasingly making their way into classrooms, scientists who study them say the data are lacking on whether they can actually improve learning — and most agree that teachers still outperform games in all but a few circumstances.
But there is growing evidence that some types of video games may improve brain performance on a narrow set of tasks. This is potentially good news for students, as well as for the millions of people who love to play, or at least can’t seem to stop playing (see infographic).
“There is a lot of evidence that people — and not just young people — spend a lot of time playing games on their screens,” says Richard Mayer, an education psychology researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “If we could turn that into something more productive, that would be a worthwhile thing to do.”
In an article in the 2019 Annual Review of Psychology, Mayer set out to evaluate rigorous experiments that tested what people can learn from games. Though he’s not entirely convinced of games’ educational potential, some studies did suggest that games can be effective in teaching a second language, math and science. The hope, he says, is to figure out how to harness any brain-boosting potential for better classroom results.
Your brain on games
Some of the first evidence that gaming may train the brain came from first-person shooter games. That these oft-maligned games might actually have benefits was first stumbled upon by an undergraduate studying psychology at the University of Rochester in New York. C. Shawn Green gave his friends a test of visual attention, and their scores were off the charts. He and his research supervisor, Daphné Bavelier, thought there must have been a bug in his coding of the test. But when Bavelier took the test, she scored in the normal range.
The difference was that Green’s friends had all been devoting more than 10 hours per week to Team Fortress Classic, a first-person shooter version of capture the flag. Green and Bavelier then rigorously retested the idea with people who were new to gaming. They had two groups train on different types of games: One group practiced a first-person shooter action game for one hour per day for 10 days, and the other spent the same amount of time on Tetris, a spatial puzzle game.
The new action gamers were significantly better at focusing on targets of interest in a cluttered, visually noisy field compared with the Tetris players. The team also found that the action gamers, on average, could consistently track five moving objects in a visual field, compared with the three that non-gamers could track.
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