Study: Casual Games "Improve" Cognition

Recently, I stumbled upon a study via Raph Koster's Website. The study has gotten a degree of publicity - games are super hot.

The study can be found here: Casual Games Help Cognition

According to the study:

"Researchers measured and tracked the participants' brain waves via electroencephalography (EEG) -- one group played the games, and a control group didn't. The study found that subjects who played casual games for 30 minute periods showed an 87 percent improvement in cognitive response time and a 215 percent increase in executive functioning. This makes it, according to ECU, about as effective as other medical treatments for cognition."

It appears that the full article has not been released yet. I am interested to see what exactly cognitive response time is operationalizing. And, are they measuring this during or after? The executive region of the brain is responsible for a variety of processes, and EEG won’t really tell us much about what region is active. Both goal processing and the processing of novel tasks are located in the executive region (prefrontal cortex) so these would certainly be candidates.

One really interesting thing about expertise and a novel tasks is, when you are new to a task you process the task in the prefrontal cortex. However, when you have become more of an expert the processing shifts to the posterior cortex. This has been seen in chess players when examining their brains using an fMRI. Do all, some, a few, or no video games shift to the posterior cortex after expertise is gained?

I suppose my point is that while this study is certainly interesting there are still quite a few unanswered questioned. The good news is that suggesting people play video games as a way to increase brain activity has a very low social cost, and the potential benefits are high.