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Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

nida.nih.gov

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Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#281

Post by mmmpop »

rednerrus wrote: post #48
colinmhayes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but for different reasons. Playing an instrument or sport means you're more likely to have a non-poor family with parents who have time to spend with you.

I think having parents who can help you develop a growth mindset is awesome and something generally reserved for upper/middle class parents. The part where your mind grows comes from practicing. So practicing video games is the same as practicing sports or instruments, the games encourage you to keep pushing yourself in the same way that a coach or teacher would.

No post body was provided.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#282

Post by dubeye »

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #115
dubeye wrote: post #60

My kid is 3.5. Would love to game with him but had assumed it was years off.... Any tips on games or consoles? I think I have an ancient ps4 in the attic somewhere but very open to buying new kit

Teach him arithmetic or how to read first. Or chess!

I love chess and play it every day but it's not an addiction I think would help a toddler. Would pick animal crossing first!

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#283

Post by znpy »

drooby wrote: post #49

I credit RuneScape with teaching me the value of delayed gratification and basic economics. I credit competitive Halo 3 with teaching me team building and strategy skills. I credit StarCraft with training my mind to travel at warp speed. Honestly. My video game experience was instrumental to my success so far in life. This is not surprising to me.

I credit Quake Live / OpenArena for teaching me anger management.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#284

Post by northernexposur »

shandor wrote: post #198
throwaway09223 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine had a lot of books and boredom. I rarely regret just getting things done. Excessive planning is a much larger issue. I find it's usually better to just do something twice rather than spend too much time thinking about it.

I've been thinking this a lot lately. One absolutely fantastic upside for just getting it done is that even if you have to redo it from scratch, you have so much better real-world understanding of the problem space. I'm inclined to think that this applies to majority of the things we do, but is often brought up regarding building products in the idea that one should build the first prototype quickly, just to be scrap…

My experience is that this works for following semi-intuitive man-made flowchart type activities (e.g. fixing a car). For truly novel endeavors with high-risk (e.g. if the risk is breaking something irreplaceable), the planning is essential.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#285

Post by arc-in-space »

Eisenstein wrote: post #188
arc-in-space wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt those controls are sufficient, individual-level IQ measures are very variant and likely incomplete, so there still could easily be pre-existing differences the controls can't sort out

I'm not seeing your point. Are you saying it is not valid because you doubt if such a study could show anything, or are you saying that you would design the study differently?

The study is what it is, I'm not saying anything about its validity, we were talking about possible interpretations of it.

The point is that we need to be careful not to take this data as implying that games cause better performance, only that it's correlated with it; guelo pointed out the study does control for BMI/IQ/etc, but I think that this is still insufficient to claim any kind of causation there*. We know nothing at all of the counterfactual world where those same kids didn't play games.

* Even if IQ tests were a message from the heavens saying THESE KIDS WERE DESTINED FOR THE EXACT SAME LEVEL OF COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE AT BIRTH we would still know nothing about causality, because there may have been something else in their lives that caused both the game-playing and the better performance.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#286

Post by gonehome »

darkerside wrote: post #268
TeMPOraL wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me until this moment to finally realize this joke relies on inefficient market to work . Consider: what if everyone in the joke's universe was a rational market actor? The $100 bill would lie there until it got consumed by rats or otherwise destroyed by natural events. For the economists' reasoning to work, there must exist some actors who don't reason this way, and instead pick up the bill on sight. How does…

I think it's a good example of how rationality is a construct. We arbitrarily choose which rational framework makes the most sense in the situation and apply it. Do you want to rely on the prior actor framework, or the react to what you see framework? That decision is not rational.

It’s a little like the newcomb’s paradox. IMO the “rational” action is the one where given the circumstances you win. At least I’d one box in that problem every time given the way it works. In this example, it’s picking up the $100.

The efficient market hypothesis always confused me since it seems empirically false. Who is making the trades that make the market efficient in the first place? Plus people (even large groups of them) are often wrong. Startups and the massive value they can create are an example of that.

Markets are a prediction of predictions to some extent and people are far from agents that act only on hard numbers (and they’re often not wrong to do so). Markets are probably the best tool we’ve got for this, but they’re far from perfectly efficient.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#289

Post by feral »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #211
gonehome wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an old joke: An economist is walking down the street when he steps on a $100 bill lying on the ground. He spots it, but decides to keep walking and doesn't pick it up. “After all,” he thinks to himself, “if that had really been a $100 bill, someone else would have picked it up already!”

It took me until this moment to finally realize this joke relies on inefficient market to work . Consider: what if everyone in the joke's universe was a rational market actor? The $100 bill would lie there until it got consumed by rats or otherwise destroyed by natural events. For the economists' reasoning to work, there must exist some actors who don't reason this way, and instead pick up the bill on sight. How does…

I don't think I'd go this far.

In the EMH people do still trade, it's just that only those with new information trade profitably.

In the joke scenario, as a parallel, you just need the economist to model that there's a chance they are the first person to see the bill.

Then you have a game theory game, where your chance of being the first person to see the bill depends on what everyone else thinks their chance was to be the first person, and hence did or didn't pick up the bill.

Then there is some optimal mixed strategy where people try pick up the bill with a certain probability, and it all works out.

Re: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

#290

Post by stuckinhell »

I'm guessing narrative games or walking simulators aren't included.

I have definitely seen video games that have difficult puzzles or complex game loops focus my kids on problem solving and how to use tools like notepad or something at their disposal. However as they are on the internet more and more, I think they are getting lazy and just getting the answers from youtube.

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