Technology Play and Brain Development : Infancy to Adolescence and Future Implications by Bergen Doris; Davis Darrel R.; Abbitt Jason T. & Darrel R. Davis & Jason T. Abbitt

Author:Bergen, Doris; Davis, Darrel R.; Abbitt, Jason T. & Darrel R. Davis & Jason T. Abbitt [Doris Bergen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-10T20:25:36+00:00

Research Studies of Elementary-Age Children’s Videogame Play

Two pilot studies of the ERP wave patterns of children ages 7–11 as they played a computer game that consisted of two types of prompts have also been conducted (Bergen, Chou, Wilks, Lyman & Thomas, 2013; Schroer, Bergen, Thomas, & Zhang, 2015). One prompt required the child to press the key that corresponded to the correct color name for sets of geometric shapes that were icons of ‘alien creatures’ (color identification) while the other prompt asked the child to select between two imaginary (choice options), such as what food would the creature like?, that did not involve a right/wrong comparison. The overall hypothesis was that the nature of the child interactions with video games that have varied affordances may affect brain activation in different ways. That is, a game that involves simple choices between right/wrong stimuli may activate brain areas that are focused on evaluating correct responses while other areas might be activated in a game that involved creative choices between equally appropriate answers.

The first study, conducted with children primarily from high socioeconomic backgrounds (mean age 107 months), found differences in the mean amplitude of the P300 wave patterns in areas of the brain involved in stimulus evaluation, with the choice condition showing greater wave amplitude than the color identification condition at Pz (parietal) and the color condition showed greater wave amplitude at Cz and Fz (central and frontal). Reduction in the P300 amplitude occurs when it is necessary to inhibit some aspects of a task to focus on a task relevant dimension (for a review, see Polich, 2013). The P300 amplitude typically increases with novelty, importance, or other characteristics that encourage memory encoding processes. That the choice trials yielded greater P300s than the correct/incorrect color identification task fits with this pattern.

In contrast, because “working” memory systems have greater activation for tasks that involve holding more information in the system or require inhibiting irrelevant information, the cognitive “load” is greater and the P300 wave amplitude is smaller. If the stimulus is novel, important, or otherwise interesting, P300 increases. For the correct/incorrect questions, the children had to focus on that dimension and inhibit others, and that reduced the P300 amplitude. On the choice tasks, the P300 wave increased because the task was more novel, interesting, or important. Analysis of the N200 wave, which is involved in object recognition tasks, showed that the color identification condition resulted in higher amplitudes of wave responses at Pz, but lower amplitude at Fz. There were no differences between boys and girls on these tasks.

The second study was conducted with children from a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds (mean age 119 months), in order to examine whether the differences found in the first study also would be found across socioeconomic groups. In this study, the choice condition again showed significantly higher P300 and P100 mean amplitudes at Pz. The choice condition also elicited a greater P300 amplitude than the color condition at Cz and a slightly larger N200 mean amplitude for the color condition at Cz, but not at Fz.

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