A recent study investigated the attention and working memory of individuals with varying computer game preferences. The findings revealed that young adults who play strategy games, as well as elderly individuals who play puzzle games, exhibited enhanced working memory and a greater ability to resist distractions compared to non-gamers. Remarkably, the working memory capacity of elderly puzzle gamers equaled that of younger individuals. The study was published in Heliyon.
Being successful in video games typically requires substantial cognitive effort. Video games often require the player to simultaneously juggle between various tasks, to evaluate the information at hand and make strings of decisions, often very quickly. It is therefore unsurprising that research indicates players of action games exhibit enhanced perception, spatial cognition, and attention — including the skill to disregard distractions — compared to non-gamers. Such studies also suggest that action gamers generally possess a higher working memory capacity than non-gamers and learn at a faster pace.
Strategy game players have also displayed heightened cognitive flexibility in previous research. Additionally, older adults who engaged in strategy games showcased improved working memory. A significant limitation in these studies, however, was the inconsistent categorization of games into specific genres. The authors of these studies frequently overlooked the mix of various elements within a game. Moreover, the majority of research targeted adolescents and young adults.
The authors of the new study wanted to investigate whether working memory capacity and resistance to distractions i.e., attention, differ between puzzle, strategy, and action gamers, and non-gamers. Working memory is a cognitive system responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information needed for tasks such as reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. It is, therefore, crucial for adequate functioning of all cognitive processes.
“Working memory (that’s our ability to hold information in mind for a short time) is vital for daily life,” explained study author Fiona McNab, a lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the University of York. “It also tends to decline in healthy ageing, with consequences for quality of life. We’re therefore keen to find ways to preserve and improve working memory.”
“Attempts to improve working memory by training it have given very mixed results. However, playing video games has quite consistently been associated with superior working memory. We were therefore keen to explore what it is about video games that is associated with superior working memory. There’s been quite a lot of research on action games, but we couldn’t be sure whether the ‘action element’ of these games was important for improving working memory.
The researchers analyzed two types of resistance to distractions – distractions that are presented together with the items that are to be remembered (encoding distractions) and those presented during the period in which information is temporarily retained and actively held in memory without external input (delay distraction).
The study involved 482 adult participants, sourced from Prolific and a statistics practical session for undergraduates, aged between 18 and 81 years. Among them, 209 were young adults (18-30 years), while 181 were older adults (60-81 years).
Participants reported the number of hours a week they spend playing digital games on any platform and the year in which they started playing digital games. They also listed the games they played in the past week.
A group of student volunteers categorized games into puzzle (games focusing on logical and conceptual challenges and on puzzle solving as primary gameplay activity), strategy (involving planning and coordination of a set of operations in order to effectively reach a goal), and action (“games characterized by simple action and response gameplay … the defining characteristic is that enemies and obstacles are overcome by ‘physical’ means rather than involves intellectual problem solving”).
Using this information, the researchers grouped participants by game preference. Given that many games blend elements from various genres, participants were re-categorized based on the predominant elements in their listed games. This was again done by a group of volunteers who discussed each participant and game and reached consensus on each classification.
Participants also completed an online working memory task. In this task, participants needed to remember positions of red circles in a grid and reproduce their position in an empty grid later. To assess encoding distraction, researchers presented two yellow circles along with red ones in some of the trials. To assess delay distraction, researchers presented a grid with two yellow circles after showing the grid with red circles, but before showing the empty grid in which participants had to reproduce positions of red circles they previously observed.
Results showed that young participants who played strategy and action games had better working memory capacity and were more resistant to distractions (had better attention) than their same-age peers who did not play games. The difference between puzzle players and the other three groups was not large enough for any definite conclusions. Older adults who played puzzle games had better working memory capacity than both non-gamers and older adults who played strategy games. They were also more resistant to encoding distractions than their age peers.
When researchers recategorized participants according to types of components in the games they play, results showed that, in younger adults, higher working memory capacity and distraction resistance were associated with more strategy game elements and not with action game elements. Working memory capacity of elderly puzzle game players was similar on average to working memory capacity of young participants (18 to 30-year-olds).
“We found that younger adults who played games with a strategy element had better working memory compared to non-gamers and other types of gamers (action or puzzle gamers). For older adults, it was puzzle gaming that was associated with superior working memory,” McNab told PsyPost.
“Without an intervention study, we can’t be sure that playing these types of games actually improves working memory. However, the results do challenge the idea that it is action game elements that are important for improving working memory. Instead the results suggest that strategic game elements may be important for younger adults and puzzle game elements may be important for older adults. The results also suggest that older adults who play puzzle games can have equivalent working memory capacity to younger non-gamers.”
The study makes a valuable contribution to the scientific understanding of the links between gaming and cognition. However, the assessment of gaming habits was based on self-reports which could have introduced a bias. Additionally, the study design does not allow any cause-and-effect conclusions to be made. Therefore, it remains unknown whether playing specific games improves working memory or whether it is simply that individuals with better working memory are more likely to play specific types of games (other options are also possible).
“We can’t be sure that playing these games actually improves working memory,” McNab said. “Furthermore, we have so far only looked at one type of attention (ability to ignore distractors during a memory task). These results challenge the idea that playing pure action games (without strategy elements) can improve working memory, and ability to ignore distractors, but we yet know whether these playing pure action games might benefit other types of attention.”
The study, “Higher working memory capacity and distraction-resistance associated with strategy (not action) game playing in younger adults, but puzzle game playing in older adults”, was authored by Joe Cutting, Bethany Copeland, and Fiona McNab.