Which came first, video game addiction or ADD?
A new study finds that frequent video gamers have a harder time focusing than those who play less often.
(Credit: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore)A new study out of Iowa State University finds that people who play video games for 40-plus hours a week have a harder time focusing on certain tasks than those who play just a few hours a week. Published in the latest issue of the journal Psychophysiology, the study also supports research published earlier this year that found a positive correlation between video game addiction and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
Researchers collected data from 51 Iowa State undergrads ages 18 to 33, about half of whom reported playing less than a couple hours of video games a week, and about half of whom reported playing an average of 43 hours a week.
Researchers monitored brain activity while participants performed the Stroop Task, a standard measure to determine attention levels. Participants had to identify the color of a word when the color and word matched, and when they did not match. (It typically takes longer to indicate the color when the word does not match.)
They found that the ability to pay attention reactively (i.e. when prompted by a trigger, such as being shot at) is similar across both types of gamers, but brain wave and behavioral measures of proactive attention (i.e. anticipating a mechanism, such as collecting pots of gold) are significantly diminished in the 43-hour-a-week gamers.
But which begets which? Is the propensity to play video games several hours a day the cause, or the effect, of proactive attention issues? The study shows correlation, but more research is required to identify the true culprit, so beware the headlines that turn this research into a "video games are bad for you" headline:
"Right now the data we're reporting in this study is really susceptible to the chicken and egg problem," said Rob West, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Psychology Program at Iowa State. "It might be that playing the games is actually producing this effect, but it could also be that individuals who, for whatever reason, like to play 40 hours a week also have this mode of attending to this kind of information in the world."
The local Des Moines news station KCCI-8 reported on the study last night with the amusingly naive headline, "Some Iowans Play 60 Hours of Video Games a Week." (To their credit, the astounded editors did not use an exclamation point.) Kira Bailey, the graduate student who led the study, jokes in her interview that recruiters realized it was tough to recruit high-volume gamers because they were, you know, at home gaming.
But don't let the nail polish of one gamer in the TV footage fool you; all 51 participants were male (although whether they wore nail polish remains undisclosed). Probably because I have a twin brother, I have always been interested in gender differences. Example: I have noticed that when I have played MMORPGs with my husband, I've had more fun creating my character--its species type, facial features, outfit, etc.--than actually playing the game. So I asked West why they didn't study women as well.
These were all males, and one of the primary reasons is that the games we were looking at are all pretty much first-person shooter, and these are typically played by males. Finding enough females to recruit into a study and say anything meaningful about playing this much first-person shooter games would be almost impossible. There are one or two, but how long would it take to get a decent sample?
OK, he's got me there. So if you are a female first-person-shooter player, be it low-level or full-on addict, or if you know one, contact Iowa State; if they've got the sample size, researchers just might investigate whether the female gaming brain has proactive attention issues as well.
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
Seems like the only people who have that much free time are kids and the unemployed, and playing that much, both groups are destined to remain that way.
Exactly,
Does this say something about people who WHOULD play video games 40+ hours per week, rather than saying something about what such playing causes?
And, I also agree with aka_tripleB.... if you can focus on video games that long, you don't have ADD. What you have, would seem to me, would be a case of selective focus.
What I actually think will be the end result of this, is to show that a lot of these 'ADD' type issues are more a matter of our not being disciplined to pay attention. Our entire culture is being programmed to be 'sound bite' individualists (ie: I'm going to pay attention to what I want to, when I want to), rather than disciplined deep-thinkers. Anyone who has pursued higher education knows the work and discipline it takes to do so. Our culture is generally being trained to rebel against such discipline and effort (other than the bare minimum it might take to get a job).
Seriously, I don't buy into this crap. It's not a disease, it's a creative mind that isn't being challenged enough.
Video games provide a constant barrage of stimulation and challenge and are much safer than many other things that ADHDers tend to gravitate to, like driving fast and participating in high risk sports like sky diving or mountain climbing.
I don't think video games would give a kid ADHD but one with it certainly could be drawn into them. Probably the best thing for a kid addicted to games would be to steer him toward writing them. That would be equally stimulating and probably more profitable than just playing.
1. The stroop test was not performed on a non-gamer-group or on diagnosed-ADD-group nor on a diagnosed-ADD-group on meds. So we have no way of knowing if the difference you are pointing to between XX hour gamers and XX hour gamers is even significant.
2. You are relying on self report for Game play time. This is going to punch huge holes in this research. Not to mention you have an over 40 group and under 40 group? You would be vastly better off showing the attention as compared to hours of game. Otherwise I would have to ask what other similarities did the over 40 group have? Age? Job? other psychological issues?
3. I have no idea how your stroop test tells the difference between reactive vs proactive. Nor how well it compares to Reactive vs Proactive in game. Has the stroop test ever been stretched to fit around this type of huge difference in activities? Because this stroop test seems to a different brain function then a videogame which weighs in heavily with motorreactions.
This is not just chicken and egg it is also apples to oranges. The stroop test doesn't seem to be a good measure here at all and it doesn't seem to have been well applied across other groups to get a good comparison of attention levels. You may well have preselected certain attention spans just as a function of them being gamers, or preselected a group of people that would not perform well on a stroop test basically because its terribly un-compelling subject matter when compared to a near real graphics intensive experience. You are essentially asking someone to pay attention to a spelling test as much as real life. Hardly a level playing field in my humble opinion.
- by perfectblue97 October 30, 2009 1:43 AM PDT
- Why oh why do people keep asking such stupid question?
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(15 Comments)If these so-called scientists were to go out into the real world it would be blindingly obvious what causes ADD/ADHD. As a former teacher I can tell you the answer in one simple, if grammatically dubious, sentence "Instant Gratification and constant stimulation" (I didn't say that I was an English teacher, did I).
Kids are constantly bombarded with short lived stimulus designed to give instant gratification. Computer games are part of the problem, but only part. TV ads, frenetic TV programs, music with fast beats and sound bite lyrics, the death of reading for pleasure, all of these things are destroying children's attention spans. They teach children to concentrate for between 30 seconds and 120 seconds, and after that unless they are hit by a new stimulus their attention stray.
Kid's lives are like an episode of Family Guy. They get five minutes of lightweight cheap story then everything suddenly goes off at a tangent with something completely unrelated suddenly being dropped into the script for no apparent reasons.
Kids need to be sat down and taught the old fashioned way. They need to be made to read though and then think through their lessons, and be made to concentrate on a single topic in depth. None of this faffy touchy feely stuff where kids are taught in short bursts and are discouraged from debating issues or questioning the reasons behind things.