Overview

The promise that electronic games might positively influence human cognition is one that generates intense public, corporate, and scientific interest. The present research drew on a large sample of school-aged children and considered both their electronic gaming and cognitive performance to test of the gaming-enhancement hypothesis. Of central interest was the nature of the potential relations between children’s self-reported preferences and gaming habits, and performance on a widely used test of deductive reasoning ability. Contrary to our expectations, the results did not provide substantial evidence in support of the idea that the complex and interactive experiences provided by commercially available games generalize to functioning outside of gaming contexts. In most cases, the evidence was in favor of the null hypothesis over this account.

We hypothesized that those who express preferences for action, strategy, and multiplayer online games, modes of play would show modestly higher levels of cognitive performance as seen in previous smaller-scale studies (Basak et al., 2011). In contrast to what was expected, we found equivocal to very strong evidence favoring the null hypothesis over this prediction. Second, we hypothesized that regular engagement with games—playing five or more hours a week of action, strategy, and multiplayer online games—would be linked with better reasoning ability. Results from our analyses did not support this prediction. Evidence for regular strategy game players were equivocal, but ranged from moderately to strongly in favor of the null for these types of games. Taken together, our findings disconfirmed the gaming-enhancement hypothesis, especially in terms of the larger effects reported in top-tier journals.

Our approach carries a number of strengths that should inform future studies of gaming effects. First, evidence from this study relied on data provided by more than 1,800 young people, a sample over 50 times larger than the average for studies examining gaming and cognition (Powers et al., 2013). If research is to sort out the cognitive dynamics of play, larger and more robust sampling is needed. Second, the Bayesian hypothesis testing approach we adopted used open source software (JASP; JASP Team, 2016) and allowed our study to quantify evidence for the both the null hypothesis as well as a plausible alternative based on the existing literature. Although the analysis plan for this study was not registered before the data were known, the framework provides valuable empirical data that researchers can use as the basis, or prior, to inform their own pre-registered designs. Finally, if indeed scholars are increasingly skeptical of corporate attempts to sell games based on their purported upsides (e.g., Allaire et al., 2014), this vigor should be extended to all scientific inquiry in this area, for example by making the materials, data, source and analysis code openly available. Future research making both positive and negative claims regarding the effects of gaming on young people should do likewise.