“Even though parents and clinicians have often observed that children with ASD tend to be preoccupied with screen-based media, ours is the first large-scale study to explore this issue,” said Micah Mazurek, assistant professor in the School of Health Professions and the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. “We found that 64 percent of adolescents with ASD spent most of their free time watching TV and playing video and computer games. These rates were much higher than among those with other types of disabilities. On the other hand, adolescents with ASD were less likely to spend time using email and social media.”

The majority of youths with ASD (64.2 percent) spend most of their free time using solitary, or non-social, screen-based media (television and video games) while only 13.2 percent spend time on socially interactive media (email, internet chatting).

This is the first study to examine the prevalence of screen-based media use within a large nationally representative sample of youths with ASD. Data were compiled from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2, a group of more than 1,000 adolescents enrolled in special education. The study includes youths with ASD, learning and intellectual disabilities, and speech and language impairments.

The findings affirm that solitary screen-based media use represents a primary and preferred activity for a large percentage of youths with ASD, Mazurek said. Previously, researchers found that excessive use of these media in typically developing children is detrimental to outcomes, with regard to academic performance, social engagement, behavioral regulation, attention and health.

“This is an important issue for adolescents with ASD and their families. Studies have shown that excessive use of TV and video games can have negative long-term effects for typically developing children,” Mazurek said. “In future studies, we need to learn more about both positive and negative aspects of media use in children with ASD. We need to look for ways to capitalize on strengths and interests in screen-based technology.”

Mazurek is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Psychology. The study was co-authored by Paul Shattuck, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University; Mary Wagner, principal scientist at SRI International, an independent, nonprofit research institute; and Benjamin Cooper, a graduate student at the Brown School.

The study, “Prevalence and Correlates of Screen-Based Media Use Among Youths with Autism Spectrum Disorders,” is published in the current issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The research was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Organization for Autism Research.

The study compared the cognitive functions for 32 elderly participants before and after four weeks of playing a computer game, either Brain Age or Tetris, for 15 minutes per day, at least five days a week.

At the end of the four weeks, the researchers found that the Brain Age players showed small improvement in their executive functions and processing speeds, but other cognitive functions were unchanged.

According to the researchers, led by Rui Nouchi of Tohoku University in Japan, where the Brain Age game was created, the relatively short training time used in the study suggests that it may be possible to improve some cognitive functions quite rapidly.

Academics on the Inter-Life project, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), developed 3D ‘Virtual Worlds’ (private islands) to act as informal communities that allow young people to interact in shared activities using avatars.  The avatars are three-dimensional characters controlled by the participants.  Virtual Worlds offer the possibility of realistic, interactive environments that can go beyond the formal curriculum. They can enable young people to develop skills which are used in real world settings, such as organisational and cognitive skills.

The project involved young people undertaking creative activities like film-making and photography, and encouraged them to undertake project activities with the virtual environments.  The students had to learn to cope with many scenarios in their island, as well as participate in the online communities over several months. Throughout the project, the researchers encouraged new forms of communication, including those used in online gaming.

The project’s lead researcher, Professor Victor Lally, said: “We demonstrated that you can plan activities with kids and get them working in 3D worlds with commitment, energy and emotional involvement, over a significant period of time.”

“It’s a highly engaging medium that could have a major impact in extending education and training beyond geographical locations,” Professor Lally added. “3D worlds seem to do this in a much more powerful way than many other social tools currently available on the internet. When appropriately configured, this virtual environment can offer safe spaces to experience new learning opportunities that seemed unfeasible only 15 years ago.”

The findings represent an early opportunity to assess the social and emotional impact of 3D virtual worlds. So far, there has been little in depth research into how emotions, social activities and thinking processes in this area can work together to help young people learn.

The Inter-Life project is part of the Technology Enhanced Learning research programme and aims to narrow the gap between young people’s experience of learning and the dominance of technologies in their everyday lives.

“The applications are enormous” said Professor Lally. “You can now create multiple science simulations or field trip locations, for example, using 3D world ‘hyper-grids’ that allow participants to ‘teleport’ between a range of experiments or activities. This enables the students to share their learning through recording their activities, presenting graphs about their results, and use voting technologies to judge attitudes and opinions from others. It can offer new possibilities for designing exciting and engaging learning spaces.”

“This kind of 3D technology has many potential applications wherever young people and adults wish to work together on intensive tasks,” he added. “It could be used to simulate training environments, retail contexts and interview situations – among many other possibilities. These virtual worlds have potential uses in education, and also a wide range of other social and academic applications.”

The controversy over whether or not violent video games are potentially harmful to users has raged for many years, making it as far as the Supreme Court in 2010. But there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative neurological effect.

“For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home,” said Yang Wang, M.D., assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. “These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.”

For the study, 22 healthy adult males, age 18 to 29, with low past exposure to violent video games were randomly assigned to two groups of 11. Members of the first group were instructed to play a shooting video game for 10 hours at home for one week and refrain from playing the following week. The second group did not play a violent video game at all during the two-week period.

Each of the 22 men underwent fMRI at the beginning of the study, with follow-up exams at one and two weeks. During fMRI, the participants completed an emotional interference task, pressing buttons according to the color of visually presented words. Words indicating violent actions were interspersed among nonviolent action words. In addition, the participants completed a cognitive inhibition counting task.

The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting task, compared to their baseline results and the results of the control group after one week. After the second week without game play, the changes to the executive regions of the brain were diminished.

“These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning,” Dr. Wang said.

A study of nearly 500 12-year-olds found that the more kids played video games, the more creative they were in tasks such as drawing pictures and writing stories. In contrast, use of cell phones, the Internet and computers (other than for video games) was unrelated to creativity, the study found.

Linda Jackson, professor of psychology and lead researcher on the project, said the study appears to be the first evidence-based demonstration of a relationship between technology use and creativity. About 72 percent of U.S. households play video or computer games, according to the Entertainment Software Association.

The MSU findings should motivate game designers to identify the aspects of video game activity that are responsible for the creative effects, Jackson said.

“Once they do that, video games can be designed to optimize the development of creativity while retaining their entertainment values such that a new generation of video games will blur the distinction between education and entertainment,” Jackson said.

The researchers surveyed 491 middle-school students as part of MSU’s Children and Technology Project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The survey assessed how often the students used different forms of technology and gauged their creativity with the widely used Torrance Test of Creativity-Figural.

The Torrance test involved tasks such as drawing an “interesting and exciting” picture from a curved shape, giving the picture a title and then writing a story about it.

In addition, the study found that boys played video games more than girls, and that boys favored games of violence and sports while girls favored games involving interaction with others (human or nonhuman).

Yet, regardless of gender, race or type of game played by the students, the study found a relation between video game playing and greater creativity.

The study appears online in the research journal Computers in Human Behavior.

By the end of the one year study, nearly 30 percent of the 100 participants achieved significant vision gains. About 60 percent showed at least some improvement. Significant gains were more likely in children who participated in Groups 3 or 4 of the four treatment regimens. Treatment Group 3 completed daily video game practice and Group 4 took the supplement citicoline, which is associated with improved brain function. Improvement was more likely in children younger than age 14 than in those 14 and older.

The prevailing wisdom has been that if amblyopia is not diagnosed and corrected before a child reaches school age, it is difficult or impossible to correct. But recently the United States-based Pediatric Eye Disease Investigation Group (PEDIG) reported significant vision gains in 27 percent of older children in a study funded by the National Eye Institute. This report motivated Dr. Ghosh to test new approaches to learn what might be particularly effective in this age group.

His study was divided into four treatment groups. Students in all groups followed a basic treatment plan that required them to wear eyeglasses that blocked the stronger eye for at least two hours a day, during which time they practiced exercises using the weaker eye. This “patching” technique is a standard amblyopia treatment that works by making the weaker eye work harder. Group one followed only the basic plan and served as the control group, while groups two, three and four received additional treatments:

• Group 2 took a supplement that contained micronutrients considered important to good vision
• Group 3 played at least one hour of video games daily using only the weaker eye
• Group 4 took the supplement citicoline, which is associated with improved brain function

Saurav Sen, a 16 year old graduate of Dr. Ghosh’s clinic, received a second chance to achieve good vision. At age 13 Sen began to experience serious vision problems, which negatively impacted his school work. Other doctors had told him it was too late to correct his amblyopia. He completed the regimen assigned to treatment Group 3.t

“Playing the shooting games while using just my weaker eye was hard at first, but after a few months I could win all game levels easily,” said Sen. “I’m very happy that I stuck with the program. My vision has improved a lot, so that I now have no trouble studying or taking exams. My tennis game also improved, and of course I’m now a pro PC gamer.”

“The cooperation of the patient is very important, maybe even crucial, to successful treatment of amblyopia,” said Dr. Ghosh. “We should never give up on our patients, even the older children, but instead offer them hope and treatment designed to help them achieve better vision.”

More than half the subjects in the three-month research project showed small improvements in walking speed, balance and stride length.

UCSF and Red Hill were the first research team in the United States to receive federal funding in the burgeoning field of low-cost computerized physical therapy games. Unlike off-the-shelf computer games, these specialized games encourage scientifically tested specific physical movements to help people with functional impairments and diseases.

Teams at Red Hill and UCSF collaborated to produce nine “clinically inspired” games that were designed to improve coordination in people with Parkinson’s disease, a chronic, progressive neuromuscular disease characterized by shaking, slowness of movement, limb and trunk rigidity. The clinical team members at UCSF focused on specific body movements and gestures that their previous research had shown to be beneficial for staving off the physical declines of Parkinson’s.

The UCSF team was led by Glenna Dowling, RN, PhD, professor and chair of the UCSF Department of Physiological Nursing, and Marsha Melnick, PT, PhD, a clinical professor in the UCSF School of Medicine’s Department of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science and professor emerita of the Department of Physical Therapy at San Francisco State University.

The Red Hill team then designed physical games, similar to Wii and Kinect games, in which subjects win points by moving their bodies in certain ways. Each game has multiple difficulty levels so that the clinical team could customize the therapeutic games for each subject’s particular abilities.

“Each subject found his or her own gaming ‘sweet spot’ – the spot where the physical challenge was not too hard, not too easy, just right,” said Bob Hone, creative director of Red Hill Studios and the lead principal investigator of the study. “And when subjects mastered one game level, they often moved on to harder levels for more beneficial effect. The subjects improved their games scores while improving their gait and balance.”

Red Hill developed a custom sensor suit with nine tracking sensors to analyze subjects’ movements with higher resolution and accuracy than is possible with consumer gaming platforms. The PC-based system sent encrypted data to a secure database allowing the research teams to track the subjects’ performance daily.

“From the data tracking we could see that there were some subjects who were playing the games more than the specified three times a week,” Hone said. “Because this was a highly structured research study, we actually had to ask them to play less than they wanted.”

The trial involved 20 participants in northern California with moderate levels of Parkinson’s disease. After playing the games for 12 weeks, 65 percent of game players demonstrated longer stride length, 55 percent increased gait velocity, and 55 percent reported improved balance confidence.

“These initial studies show the promise of custom-designed physical therapy games promoting specific movements and gestures that can help patients get better,” Dowling said. “Now that we have this preliminary positive result, we want to conduct a longer term clinical trial with more subjects to confirm these initial findings.”

“First-person shooter” games have been discussed in connection with violence over and over. Participants take on the role of a shooter fighting opponents in a war-like situation using different weapons. The Norwegian killer is said to have participated in such worlds intensely before he killed dozens of people in Oslo’s government district and on the vacation island of Utoya. And after the shooting sprees in Erfurt, Emsdetten and Winnenden, the debate whether violent games lower the inhibition threshold and result in violent behavior was revived again.

Psychologists, epileptologists and neurologists from the University of Bonn studied the effect of shoot ‘em up game images and other emotionally charged photos on the brain activity of heavy gamers.

“Compared to people who abstain from first-person shooters, they show clear differences in how emotions are controlled,” reported lead author Dr. Christian Montag from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Bonn.

Excessive first-person shooting of about 15 hours a week

The 21 subjects ranging in age from 20 to 30 years played first-person shooters for about 15 hours per week on average. During this study, they were shown a standardized catalog of photos that reliably trigger emotions in human brains, using video glasses. At the same time, the researchers recorded the responses in their brains using one of the brain scanners at the Life & Brain Center of the University of Bonn. The images included photos as they are used in the violent games, but also shots of accident and disaster victims. “This mix of images allowed us to transport the subjects both to the fictitious first-person shooter world they are familiar with and to also trigger emotions via real images,” explained Dr. Montag. This catalog of photos was also shown to a control group of 19 persons who had no experience with violent video games.

When the subjects regarded the real, negative pictures, there was greatly increased activity in their amygdalas. This region of the brain is strongly involved in processing negative emotions.

“Surprisingly, the amygdalas in the subjects as well as in the control group were similarly stimulated,” reported Montag. “This shows that both groups responded to the photos with similarly strong emotions.”

But the left medial frontal lobes were clearly less activated in the users of violent games than in the control subjects. This is the brain structure humans use to control their fear or aggression.

“First-person shooters do not respond as strongly to the real, negative image material because they are used to it from their daily computer activities,” Montag concluded. “One might also say that they are more desensitized than the control group.” On the other hand, while processing the computer game images, the first-person shooters showed higher activity in brain regions associated with memory recall and working memory than the control group members. “This indicates that the gamers put themselves into the video game due to the computer game images and were looking for a potential strategy to find a solution for the game status shown,” said Dr. Montag.

Violent games as a cause for changes in brain activity?

One question raised while interpreting the results is whether the users showed altered brain activity due to the games, or whether they were more tolerant of violence from the start and as a consequence, preferred first-person shooter games. The researchers from the University of Bonn were able to suggest an answer to this question based on the fact that they took into account various personality traits such as fearfulness, aggressiveness, callousness or emotional stability. “There were no differences between the subjects and the control group in this area,” reported Dr. Montag. “This is an indication that the violent games are the cause of the difference in information processing in the brain.”

From the results, Dr. Montag has concluded that emotional desensitization does not only occur while playing computer games. “We were ultimately able to find the decreased control of emotions in first-person shooters for the real images, too,” he said. That is why he thinks these responses are not just limited to these virtual worlds. While there are many studies on video games and aggressive behavior, surprisingly few exist that look at their effect on the brain. “Our results provide indications that the extensive use of first-person shooters is not without its problems,” said Dr. Montag. “But we will need additional studies to shed some more light on the connections between violent games, brain activity, and actual behavior.”

In Cerebral Cortex, Prof. Dr. Denise Manahan-Vaughan and Anne Kemp of the RUB Department for Neurophysiology report about these findings.

When the researchers presented rats with new spatial environments on a computer screen, they observed long-lasting changes in the communication between nerve cells in a brain structure which is important for long-term memory (hippocampus). Thus, the researchers showed for the first time that active exploration of the environment is not necessary to obtain this effect.

“These results help to understand to what extent digital learning in the brain competes with learning in the physical environment”, says Manahan-Vaughan. “This is interesting for developing strategies for use of digital media in school. Such strategies can prove a useful antidote to the apathy in children towards the traditional teaching methods.”

In the hippocampus, two different mechanisms for the long-term storage of new information are at work . Long-term potentiation leads to an increase in the communication between nerve cells. Long-term depression, on the other hand, weakens the connections between the cells.

“According to our results, cell populations react with potentiation at the beginning, for instance when we enter a new room “, explains Manahan-Vaughan. “Long-term depression then allows us to refine this new cellular information and encode the details and characteristics of the room.”

Learning without movement

The Bochum team showed that long-term depression takes place in a special part of the hippocampus, when rats actively explore their environment. “We were, however, not sure if these changes in nerve cell communication were influenced by the movement of the animals or were purely due to learning about the novel objects”, explains Manahan-Vaughan. In order to separate both effects, the researchers presented the spatial context via a computer screen so that active exploration of the environment was unnecessary. Long-term depression occurred also without movement, meaning that it mediates passive learning in the hippocampus.

Computer and TV compete with learning in school

“School teachers, particularly at the junior school level have become increasingly concerned at their observations that each generation of school children exhibits shorter attention spans and poorer retention abilities than the previous generation”, states Manahan-Vaughan. “One explanation for this is the ever increasing use of the digital media by school children. Our results indeed show that mammals can learn equally well when they passively view information on a computer screen compared to actively exploring the environment for this information. Television or computer games after school may compete with the information learned in school.”

Over the past decade, many studies and news media reports have suggested that action video games such as Medal of Honor or Unreal Tournament improve a variety of perceptual and cognitive abilities. But in a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Walter Boot, an assistant professor in Florida State University’s Department of Psychology, critically reevaluates those claims.

Together with FSU psychology doctoral student Daniel Blakely and University of Illinois collaborator Daniel Simons, Boot lays out what he believes is a persuasive argument that much of the work done over the past decade demonstrating the benefits of video game play is fundamentally flawed.

“Despite the hype, in reality, there is little solid evidence that games enhance cognition at all,” he said.

The authors make the case that a number of influential studies supporting the superior skills of action gamers suffer from a host of methodological flaws. Many of those studies compared the cognitive skills of frequent gamers to non-gamers and found gamers to be superior. However, Boot and his coauthors point out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that their game experience caused better perceptual and cognitive abilities. It could be that individuals who have the abilities required to be successful gamers are simply drawn to gaming.

Researchers looking for cognitive differences between expert and novice gamers often recruit research participants by circulating ads on college campuses seeking “expert” video game players. That wording alone, Boot argues, “lets participants know how researchers expect them to perform on challenging, often game-like computer tests of cognition.”

Media reports on the superior skills of gamers heighten gamers’ awareness of these expectations. Even studies in which non-gamers are trained to play action video games have their own problems, often in the form of weak control groups, according to Boot and his coauthors.

Boot, who grew up playing video games, said at first he was excited about research that claimed playing action video games could enhance basic measures of attention. He and his fellow researchers conducted their own video-game training study to determine what other abilities might improve following video game play, but they were unable to replicate the training benefits found in earlier studies.

“The idea that video games could enhance cognition was exciting because it represented one of the few cases in which cognitive training enhanced abilities that weren’t directly practiced,” Boot said. “But we found no benefits of video game training.” Not only did some of his studies fail to replicate those earlier findings, but “no study has yet met the ‘gold standard’ methods necessary in intervention studies of this sort.”

In fact, certain methodological problems appeared again and again in the studies that Boot and Blakely and reviewed. Even more important than identifying flaws of previous studies, Blakely said, their new paper outlines a series of best practices for researchers who want definitive answers on the potential benefits of video game play.

Boot and Blakely haven’t entirely written off video games as a way to boost perceptual and cognitive abilities; in fact, they’re still open to the possibility. But before they start recommending video game interventions as a means to improve perception and cognition for kids, adults and senior citizens, they say more evidence is necessary.

“If people are playing games to improve their cognition, they may be wasting their time,” Boot said. “Play games because you enjoy them, not because they could boost your brain power.”