2023-10-04 08:45:54
An American and an Italian study analyzed the influences of different games on brain activity and their ability to increase different mental faculties
Those who regularly play action video games such as Elden Ring, Ragnarok, God of War or The Last of US develop greater attention, better working memory and a greater ability to ignore distracting factors than those who use other types of videogames: this is according to a study by researchers from the New York Psychology Department directed by Joe Cutting published in the summer in the journal Helyion. In these video games it is necessary to simultaneously juggle various tasks such as identifying, tracking and avoiding certain stimuli, accelerating perceptual processes to the limits of attention with a significant cognitive advantage. Compared to other gamers, habitual action gamers (mostly engaged in so-called shooter video games) reported higher indices of perception, spatial cognition and selective attention for important stimuli. Evaluating these abilities in 209 young adults (18-30 years old) these functions are superior for strategy and action players and performances are associated with the strategies adopted by the player rather than with the components of the game.
More seniors
Analyzing 181 older adults (60-81 years old), they demonstrated equivalent superior abilities when it came to solving puzzle problems in video games such as Tetris or Lemmings. When you want to use video games for rehabilitation purposes, the correlation between cognitive abilities and gaming behavior must therefore include age-appropriate use of the video game. It’s interesting to note that if you play action games, even those who don’t play these games after a while develop superior spatial and top-down attention functions, the so-called top-down attention, that is, attention aimed at current objectives, guided by experience. passed and managed by the fronto-parietal brain circuit, important for attentional processes.
Table games
A neurophysiological explanation of these phenomena comes from another study by researchers at the Bicocca University of Milan directed by Carlo Ferrarese, published at the end of September in the Journal of Alzheimer Disease, and which will be presented on October 23rd at the next Sin (Italian Society of Neurology) congress ) of Naples by Federico Emanuele Pozzi, collaborator of Ferrarese. Taking up the studies of five databases with an extensive review, the Milanese researchers have verified that traditional board games can influence functions in different domains by slowing down the cognitive decline of elderly people with MCI, an acronym for mild cognitive impairment, that is, mild cognitive impairment, even if they do not improve the so-called Digit Span, that is, the ability to quickly say the alphabet or a series of numbers forward or backward.
Lattice versus chessboard
Using various neuropsychological tests, it appears that, as happens with video games, different board games also affect different cognitive functioning. Compared to control subjects, in the MoCA and MMSE tests used by the researchers, all the players evaluated reported a general positive effect, but in the TMT-A test which evaluates complex attention, the Chinese game Ska & Go also reported higher scores than chess if chessboard strategies have always been considered brainy. Evidently moving on a grid to surround and leave no escape routes for the opponent as in Ska & Go is cognitively more complex than moving on the board. On the other hand, chess is superior to the WHO-QoL-OLD test, a test that evaluates the quality of life in those over 60: with the chessboard they improve sensory abilities, autonomy, intimacy, social participation, satisfaction with one’s past, present and future activities and the fear of death goes away.
Mahjong
In the STT-B test, however, chess is surpassed by another Chinese game that dates back to the times of Confucius called Mahjong and made with large colorful tiles to be played as solitaire. It improves executive functions, those that allow us to plan and complete a task. It also stimulates the categorical fluidity of language, an index of semantic memory, that is, the storehouse of our memory of the world, from the price of petrol to the name of the President of the Republic. This is something that Ska & Go is unable to do, even if it increases the metabolism of the putamen, the cerebral nucleus, which is also important in learning, and that of the middle temporal gyrus, which is important in the recognition of faces or words read. It also increases the levels of BDNF, the brain trophic factor that improves neuronal plasticity.
October 4, 2023 (modified October 4, 2023 | 08:10)
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