Enhancing Cognition with Video Games: A Multiple Game Training Study

Oei, Adam; Patterson, Michael D. · 2013 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058546

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Summary

This study investigates whether cognitive benefits associated with video game training are specific to action games or extend to other genres. While previous research established that action video games enhance perceptual and cognitive abilities, the effects of non-action games remained under-investigated. The authors aimed to determine if different game types, requiring distinct cognitive demands, produce specific transfer effects on cognition. They hypothesized that improvements would result from "near transfer," where training improves performance on tasks sharing similar underlying cognitive processes, rather than "far transfer" involving general executive control. The researchers conducted a longitudinal training study with 70 non-gamer participants (undergraduates) randomly assigned to one of five groups: action, spatial memory, match-3, hidden-object, or agent-based life simulation. Participants played their assigned game on a mobile device for one hour daily, five days a week, over four weeks (20 hours total). Cognitive performance was assessed before and after training using four behavioral tasks: an attentional blink task, a visual filter memory task (assessing cognitive control and multiple-object tracking), a dual-task combining visual search and spatial working memory, and a complex verbal span task. The results demonstrated that cognitive improvements were not limited to action games. Action game training eliminated the attentional blink effect and improved cognitive control and multiple-object tracking. In contrast, match-3, spatial memory, and hidden-object games improved visual search performance, with the latter two also enhancing spatial working memory. Complex verbal span improved following both match-3 and action game training. The agent-based life simulation game, which lacked specific cognitive demands aligned with the test tasks, did not yield significant improvements. Statistical analyses confirmed significant time-by-group interactions, indicating that specific games led to specific cognitive gains. The study concludes that video game training enhances cognition through near-transfer effects, where frequent utilization of specific cognitive processes during gameplay improves performance on tasks with similar demands. This challenges the notion that action games provide broad, general improvements in executive attentional control. Instead, the findings suggest that different game genres train distinct cognitive abilities, implying that the choice of game should align with the specific cognitive skills one aims to enhance. This has implications for designing cognitive training interventions, suggesting that targeted game selection is more effective than relying on a single genre for broad cognitive enhancement.

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• cognitive capacity variation