Is there a link between gaming and neurological disorders?

Royal Society: A paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B today links action video game playing with changes in how people use parts of their brain to solve problems. Collectively we spend 3 billion hours every week playing video games and it’s estimated that the average young person will now spend nearly 10,000 hours (more than a year!) of their life gaming by the time they are 21. With such intense exposure to gaming it’s increasingly important to understand the neurological and cognitive effect gaming could have.

Gamers may lack grey matter

Scimex: Canadian scientists say around 80 per cent of video gamers learn by habit when navigating a game, compared to only around 42 per cent of non-gamers. Previous studies have linked habit learning to decreased grey matter in the hippocampus - a brain area involved in memory formation, organisation, and storage, suggesting gamers may be at risk of developing neurological disorders, they say.

Risk-takers are more likely to copy risky decisions

Scimex: A US study tested participants during a gambling task, and found they were more likely to pick an option if they'd seen another person making that choice. They also found that risk-averse people were more likely to copy safe choices, while risk-takers were more likely to copy risky decisions. Brain scans showed an area of the brain involved in making subjective choices - the ventromedial prefrontal cortex- activates when the copycat decisions are made.

Gambling and Sex Linked

Columbia: Late adolescence is a period when many youth become involved in high-risk behaviors with adverse consequences. Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University studied the degree to which two such behaviors, adolescent sexual behaviors and gambling, affected African American youth in nine primary schools in Baltimore, MD. In data collected from a cohort study, they assessed whether certain adolescent sexual behaviors linked with unintended consequences such as adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections [STI]) are associated with gambling behaviors. The study, “Gambling and Sexual Behaviors in African-American Adolescents,” is online in Addictive Behaviors. Gambling and sexual behaviors are often together among adolescents. Such findings prompt the need for the inclusion of gambling, an often overlooked risky behavior, in behavioral prevention/intervention programs targeting adolescents.

Media consumption and parenting need not clash

University of Amsterdam. Netherlands.: Why are so many young people glued to their smartphones? Does gaming have a negative impact on adolescent development? Are the effects of sex in the media necessarily all bad? Many parents wonder whether they should protect children against their own media consumption habits, and if so, how to go about it.