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REAL LIFE NEWS: VIDEO GAMES LINKED TO ATTENTION DEFICIT... OOH, CHOCOLATE!

by Hazed

Video games are under attack again. If it's not people claiming that they turn players into psychopaths, or that anyone who plays is an antisocial loser, now a new study says there's a "relation" between frequent gaming and ADD.

Scientists from Iowa State University set up a test which was designed to measure the effects of playing video games on two different types of cognitive activity: proactive attention, which is described as a "gearing up" mechanism such as anticipating what action you need to do next to progress in a game; and reactive attention, which is described as a "just in time" response, like the reaction to a monster jumping out in front of you.

They tested both frequent players, who play for four or more hours a day, and occasional players. The test used a basic visual task while measuring their brain waves and behavioural responses. The task was to identify the color of a word when it's sometimes written in a different color, for example the word RED sometimes written in red and sometimes in blue.

The theory is that humans have a tendency to read words automatically, so you have to concentrate a lot harder in order to quickly name the actual color when it is different from what the word says.

The result: reactive control was similar for both groups, but for the frequent gamers, brain wave and behavioural measures of proactive attention were found to be "significantly diminished".

Now that doesn't in itself mean that computer games cause ADD! In fact, linking this result to ADD at all may be a bit dubious. However, another study has shown that youths who were addicted to video games were 2.77 times more likely to report being diagnosed with ADD.

This could, of course, mean that a side-effect of having ADD is that it makes you a bit obsessive when it comes to playing games...

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