Children spent 2.5 hours a day watching TV and 1 hour playing video games
Spending an above-average time playing video games can boost intelligence
The same cannot be said for watching TV or engaging with social media
Researchers said the results should reassure parents worried about screen time
Many parents feel guilty when their children spend hours on end staring at screens – and some even worry it could make them less clever.
But a new study suggests that spending an above-average time playing video games can actually help boost children's intelligence.
Researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden carried out psychological tests on more than 5,000 children in the US aged between ten and 12, to gauge their general cognitive abilities.
The children and their parents were also asked about how much time the children spent watching TV and videos, playing video games and engaging with social media.
The researchers then followed up with the children two years later, at which point they were asked to repeat the psychological tests.
The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence by approximately 2.5 IQ points more than the average between the two measurements.
No significant effect was observed, positive or negative, of TV-watching or social media.
Shooter video games like Call of Duty are often citied as the motivation for real-life gun crimes.
But according to a recent study, there's no evidence that these games cause violence in the real world.
The researchers looked at how adolescent boys' violent behaviour is affected by the releases of new violent video games in the US.
They concluded that policies intended to place restrictions on video game sales to minors – as attempted by several US states – are unlikely to reduce violence.
'While children who played more video games at ten years were on average no more intelligent than children who didn't game, they showed the most gains in intelligence after two years,' said Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.
'For example, a child who was in the top 17 per cent in terms of hours spent gaming increased their IQ about 2.5 points more than the average child over two years.
This is evidence of a beneficial, causal effect of video games on intelligence.'
For the study, the researchers created an intelligence index from five tasks: two on reading comprehension and vocabulary, one on attention and executive function , one assessing visual-spatial processing, and one on learning ability.
Repeating the psychological tests two years apart enabled the researchers to study how the children's performance varied from one testing session to the other, and to control for individual differences in the first test.
They also controlled for genetic differences that could affect intelligence and differences that could be related to the parents' educational background and income.
'If unaccounted for, these factors could mask the true effect of screen time on children's intelligence,' the researchers said.
'For example, children born with certain genes might be more prone to watch TV and, independently, have learning issues.'
On average, children spent two and a half hours a day watching online videos or TV programmes, half an hour socialising online, and one hour playing video games.
In total, that is four hours a day of screen time for the average child and six hours for the top 25 per cent – a large portion of a child's free time.
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