Do Video Games Cause Attention Problems?

This month, I picked up a concerned parent from the waiting room. I walked her to my office and asked how I could help.

“My 10-year-old son can’t focus on anything. I think it’s because of the video games. He won’t read because he says it’s boring, he won’t even play a board game with me. He keeps getting in trouble at school for playing games on his Chromebook in class. The only time he sits still is when he’s playing video games.”

This is a common concern for parents. Are video games causing kids to have trouble focusing on anything else?

Why might video games decrease attention span?

Researchers have proposed several hypotheses that might account for any relationship between video games and trouble paying attention.

1. Video games are so exciting that everything else is boring by comparison. I regularly hear this complaint from young clients. School is boring. Homework is boring. Teachers are boring. How can anyone expect them to sit through class when they know how much more fun they could be having?
2. Screen time keeps us from other activities which would help us build attention span. Some suggest that because video games are too easy to focus on, we miss opportunities to build attention through activities like reading or learning a musical instrument.
3. People who have trouble paying attention are more likely to play video games. As I’ve mentioned previously, people with ADHD seem especially drawn to video games as they are easier to focus on than many other pastimes.
4. Another variable correlates with both attention span and video game play. For example, boys are slightly more likely to play video games and are diagnosed with ADHD three times as often as girls. Whether boys are more likely to have ADHD or just more likely to receive a diagnosis is questionable, but it could explain an apparent correlation between video game play and attention span. Depression could similarly affect both ability to focus and how much time one plays video games.
5. Video games interfere with sleep, which affects our ability to pay attention. Sleep is crucial for focus and anything that keeps us from getting enough would probably also correlate with attention problems.

The evidence

Several studies have explored a potential link between video game play and difficulty with attention.

One group of researchers surveyed three thousand Singaporean adolescents on time spent gaming, their favorite games, “how often they killed creatures [and] players” in those games, symptoms of ADHD, impulsiveness, and how well they had done on recent tests. They repeated this three times, each one year apart.

They found that time spent playing video games correlated with a very small increase in symptoms of ADHD and impulsivity. Notably, the study relied on adolescents to accurately estimate how much time they spent playing video games and to assess their own symptoms of ADHD. Research suggests that people cannot accurately estimate how much time they spend playing video games.

Another study asked 85 gamers to complete an attention test. During the test, participants watched a computer as symbols flashed on the screen. Each participant had to press a button on a game controller as quickly as possible when they saw a specific symbol, but not when others appeared. This is called a go/no-go test and measures impulsivity. Impulsive people are more likely to press the button when the wrong symbol appears on the screen.

They found that people who played more video games did better on the test. This implies that dedicated gamers are better at paying attention. However, this study also had flaws. The test was correlational; those with better reaction times might be naturally better at video games and therefore enjoy them more. The test was also administered with a screen and controller and was inherently game-like. More intense gamers might simply be more practiced at this specific type of attention. Like the previous study, researchers also relied on people to accurately recount how many hours they spent gaming per week.

A third study surveyed six hundred Hispanic Texans age 10-14 on their time spent gaming, a number of life stressors such as exposure to violence in the home and in the community, and asked parents and children about attention problems and GPA. They found that many variables predicted attention problems, particularly anxiety. However, exposure to video games and TV did not appear to have any effect on attention problems.

In short, time spent playing video games appears to have little or no effect on attention span. A 2014 survey of nearly 200,000 students revealed that gamers do equally well in school as their non-gamer peers.

However, this might not be true for all ages. Some studies have found that watching television before age 4 correlates with attention problems by age 7. I don’t recommend children have any screen time before age 4. Unstructured time spent banging their dolls together or playing with you is better for their brains and overall development. If you decide to let them use screens anyway, make sure that they are only exposed to high-quality, slow-paced programs such as Sesame Street or Ms. Rachel and watch alongside them whenever possible.

This post is adapted from Andrew’s upcoming book Parenting a Gamer: Help Your Child Build Healthy Habits, Make Positive Choices, and Find Balance in Virtual Worlds.