Torkel Klingberg. Photo: Sara MacKey
On average, the children spent 2.5 hours a day watching TV, half an hour on social media and 1 hour playing video games. The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence between the two measurements by approximately 2.5 IQ points more than the average. No significant effect was observed, positive or negative, of TV-watching or social media.
“We didn’t examine the effects of screen behaviour on physical activity, sleep, wellbeing or school performance, so we can’t say anything about that,” says Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. “But our results support the claim that screen time generally doesn’t impair children’s cognitive abilities, and that playing video games can actually help boost intelligence. This is consistent with several experimental studies of video-game playing.”
Intelligence is not constant
The results are also in line with recent research showing that intelligence is not a constant, but a quality that is influenced by environmental factors.
“We’ll now be studying the effects of other environmental factors and how the cognitive effects relate to childhood brain development,” says Torkel Klingberg.
One limitation of the study is that it only covered US children and did not differentiate between different types of video games, which makes the results difficult to transfer to children in other countries with other gaming habits. There was also a risk of reporting error since screen time and habits were self-rated.
The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council and the Strategic Research Area Neuroscience (StratNeuro) at Karolinska Institutet. The researchers report no conflicts of interest.
Publication
“The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background”. Bruno Sauce, Magnus Liebherr, Nicholas Judd, Torkel Klingberg. Scientific Reports, online 11 May 2022, doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-11341-2