Video games don't rot your brain—they train it

*CU Boulder scientists find that playing video games comes with small but significant cognitive benefits*. However, a number of studies have suggested that playing video games can help strengthen people’s cognitive abilities. Chandra Reynolds, a CU Boulder professor of psychology and neuroscience, and her research colleagues found small, positive cognitive benefits of playing video games. Most studies of video games are cross sectional, and they don’t have indices of people’s cognitive performance at earlier ages.”. CU Boulder researcher Chandra Reynolds and her colleagues found that spatial reasoning benefited most consistently from playing video games. Spatial reasoning benefited most consistently from playing video games, with a significant effect measured in all three tests before and after adjustment for adolescent IQ, although the effect was about half as large after adjustment. When video game play was broken down by the broad genre of game, there were some negative correlations: people who played Action+ games scored worse on processing speed, and those who played Puzzle+ games scored worse on spatial reasoning.

**Source Insight**: This report was curated based on original coverage from colorado.edu.