Questionable conclusions from "Your Brain on Video Games"

Daphne Bavelier: Your brain on videogame

In this TEDTAlk, cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier debunks some popular misconceptions about the negative effects of playing video games, and asserts that playing fast-paced action games (such as first-person shooters) can actually benefit our brains, and improve our eyesight.

However, we should not come away from this TEDTalk with the conclusion that playing action games improves concentration or multitasking. Although the structure and the rhetoric of her presentation often implies that video game playing causes people to have a high ability to focus and multitask, all we can really conclude from the studies she cites is that video game playing correlates with doing well on a few game-like psychological tests that are ostensibly indexes of concentration and multitasking capabilities.

What Bavelier says about eyesight is straightforward enough. Test subjects with poor vision are asked to play a moderate amount of action games for a few weeks. When they leave the study, they have better eyesight than before they went in (and presumably, better eyesight than members of a control group who did not play games during the same interim). There's a clear causal relationship.

Unfortunately, that's where the good and simple science comes to an end. Bavelier's assertions about the relationship between action games, attention span, and the ability to multitask are murky and imprecise.

Bavelier uses two game-like tests to measure the attention span of gamer and non-gamer test subjects. In the first test, the subject is presented with a series of words, and each word is written in a different color font. The subject attempts to name the color that a word is written in, even when the word is the name of a different color—for example, the word "green" might be written in blue, and the subject successfully completes the test if they are able to say "blue"—the color that the word is written in, as opposed to "green," the meaning that the word spells. As it turns out, action gamers are better at correctly naming the color of the word than non-action gamers. Therefore, Bavelier says, "playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems."

Color me unconvinced. Nobody should be surprised that action-gamers are able to perform well on this test. Quickly solving a confusing-yet-simple color puzzle isn't very different from quickly moving a crosshair onto an enemy in Black Ops II.

But is that really what we mean when we say that somebody has a high attention span? I associate "paying attention" with being able to focus on listening to a lecture, writing a piece of code, watching a long film or observing nature, etc. These attention-challenges are often much more complex and less interactive than the "quick, name the color" test and popular action games. Listening, composing, and observing all require active reflection, patience, and critical thinking, rather than short-term memory and impulsive reflexes.

Bavelier invokes another test where action gamers are able to keep track of more objects on a screen than non-action gamers. The implication is that gamers score well on the test because they are gamers. But couldn't it be that the people who are naturally able to keep track of multiple visual variables at once are also the same sort of people who are more likely to be good at video games, and are therefore more likely to play them?

This question applies to what Bavelier says about action gamer brains being more "efficient" in those regions that are associated with the ability to pay attention. (She does not, unfortunately, go into what she means by "efficient" in the context of neural networks.) In the brains of action gamers, the parietal cortex (which aims attention), the frontal lobe (the attention sustainer), and the anterior cingulate (the attention locater, regulator, and conflict resolver) are all "more efficient" than in the brains of non-action gamers. Once again, Bavelier does not address the potential confusion between correlation and causation. She implies that these networks of the brain are more efficient in gamers because they are in the habit of navigating a virtual world. It seems to me that somebody with a more efficient parietal cortex might be more likely to play video games because they're naturally good at them.

In her defense, Bavelier never blatantly asserts that playing video games will increase your attention span. However, her ambiguity is problematic. Are video games "good" for the brain, or not? What does a healthy brain look like to her? Who is funding her research?

Questions and criticisms aside, I hope that Bavelier is right in her optimistic take on video games. A lot of us spend a lot of time playing games, and I want to believe that we're getting something more than mindless fun out of it. However, we need to be careful not to confuse cause and effect. If we believe that we have good attention spans because we play games, then gaming becomes a strengthening activity like exercise, when the opposite might be the case. When we play games while believing that we're doing something good for ourselves, we might actually just be spinning our cognitive wheels in virtual mud, and not cultivating any skills that are useful outside of the context of the gaming world.

Gamers might be able to score well on Bavelier's tests, but I'm more interested in comparing the meaningful aspects of the lives of gamers and non-gamers. Are gamers more or less likely to be happy than non-gamers? Are they more or less likely to have a comfortable income? To have good relationships with the people in their life? A gamer could have the most efficient parietal cortex in the world, but all of their brain power might be doing very little to benefit themselves if all of their mental effort is focused on getting headshots in Call of Duty.