Videogame exposure positively associates with selective attention in a cross-sectional sample of young children.

Tiana Comessotti,Sheri Madigan,Ryann Tansey,Suhyeon Park,Alexandria D Samson,Anish Arora,Deborah Dewey,Signe Bray,Trinidad Garcia,Christiane S Rohr,Amanda Ip

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0257877

Abstract

There is growing interest in how exposure to videogames is associated with young children's development. While videogames may displace time from developmentally important activities and have been related to lower reading skills, work in older children and adolescents has suggested that experience with attention-demanding/fast-reaction games positively associates with attention and visuomotor skills. In the current study, we assessed 154 children aged 4-7 years (77 male; mean age 5.38) whose parents reported average daily weekday recreational videogame time, including information about which videogames were played. We investigated associations between videogame exposure and children's sustained, selective, and executive attention skills. We found that videogame time was significantly positively associated only with selective attention. Longitudinal studies are needed to elucidate the directional association between time spent playing recreational videogames and attention skills.

Highlights

There is growing concern about young children’s exposure to screen-media activities (SMA) [1, 2], such as television or videogames, as excessive exposure may displace time from other developmentally important activities and could impact brain, behaviour, and cognitive development [3,4,5,6]
We note that the distribution of maternal education in our sample was skewed towards the upper end of our scale
The ability to filter irrelevant information, another selective attention skill, was shown to be enhanced in action gamers ( 5 hours of videogame play per week) compared to non-gamers ( 1 hour of videogame play per week) in conjunction with gamers displaying different neural activity, suggested to be associated with greater attentional control [29]. Dissimilar to these adult studies, we note that our effect of Videogame exposure in young children selective attention was associated with videogame duration rather than with a particular type of videogame

Summary

Introduction

There is growing concern about young children’s exposure to screen-media activities (SMA) [1, 2], such as television or videogames, as excessive exposure may displace time from other developmentally important activities and could impact brain, behaviour, and cognitive development [3,4,5,6]. Use of videogames in young children may be increasing with the proliferation and accessibility of gaming devices [7, 8]. A 2015 study in a large UK cohort showed that ~70% of 5-year old children play video/electronic games regularly [9]. Childhood is a interesting and important period in which to examine associations.

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