Study "Strongly" Links Gaming With Kids' Poor Attention Spans

[Nouw]

Most of my friends in my class plays games. I should also add its the extension fucking class
Seriously, some of us Gamer Students are quite clever people.

Also, I bet the Schools system is too classic and old.

 

[Luke Cartner]

correlation =/= causation

The study indicated that kids with short attention spans play games.
This could indicate either that games give kids short attention spans or alternative games entertain kids with short attention spans more compared to other activities more than children with longer attention spans.
As far as the comment about adhd, as computers and computer games access both sides of the brain at the same time it is common for people with adhd to be interested in computers more than people without adhd.

Given that people with adhd tend to self medicate if their brains do no experience the level of stimulation they need then trends such as these are a good thing, after the alternative is usually drugs..

 

[Anah'ya]

I've been playing since I was a kid. My attention span is fi-- ooh, shiny phone! *plays with it*

That's me saying I agree to that. But not because the games are at a fault, but because kids and folks like me enjoy something they.. enjoy.. more than the static world around them.

 

[Michael826]

This is one of the few "studies" i can comfortably agree with. Sure, it's not always the case, but I find it tends to be true with most of the people i know.

 

[Jamieson 90]

I can't understand why we need these obvious studies.

Put a TV in a kids room and they will find it hard to sleep because there is the temptation to watch TV, duh.....

Let a kid play computer games all the time then they wont be doing other things like exercising and doing homework etc.

Its called balance, too much of anything is bad for you. Parents need to put down strict rules and control their kids gaming or it will become an obsession etc. I know if I ever have kids then I will try to get them outside and be as active as possible, Teach them to ride a bike and swim, messing about in garden, football/catch etc what ever, Not letting the TV/computer babysit them.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

I think the issue is that kids want to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to, not some test, so maybe these tests are inherently incorrect?

As abominably hilarious as your post is, it's frighteningly plausible.

 

[orangeapples]

wow, I just got bored half way through reading this, stood up and got something to eat...

 

[The_ModeRazor]

I'm a gamer.
I read War and Peace all the way through without forgetting any earlier plot points/character development . (although I can't remember the names for shit, but that's more to do with me having problems rememebering names in general)
Yeah, I sure have ADHD.
(not that it was the best book I read, but I liked it - except for Tolstoj's stupid philosophy stuff at the end)

 

[daftalchemist]

Geez, I could have told anyone this. My boyfriend's cousin plays games nearly nonstop, and has always had the worst attention span in games and outside of them. He's never been able to sit through an entire movie no matter how much he's enjoying it, and he couldn't even get a character in WoW past level 5 before he was making a new one to try out.

 

[gl1koz3]

I'm reading some

Let me tell you something about attention spans of kids.

My brother is a decade older than me by now (36 years old) and has had a fair bit of experience teaching music in many different kinds of grade schools, where attention spans of kids are usually the worst.

In just 6 months he enjoyed more success with his teaching as well as more admiration from both other professors and his own students than anyone else has at that school for as long as they can remember.

Why? Because he grew up as a gamer. He understood, that to entice the younger generations of today you need to adapt your teaching methods so that they hook their shorter attentions spans properly. And sure enough, his students started to pester him more and more to tell things about music they'd never dreamed of. He didn't compare the classical music examples to the kids, he compared things like Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody or Metallica as examples, ones that he could support with musical theory as well to boot.

All of these kids that study under him suddenly have incredibly long attention spans in his classes while they remain bored within other classes run by more senior and old-school professors.

Gaming making kids have shorter attention spans? More like the older generation being unwilling to adapt to their needs as being such and instead clinging onto the past with studies like this one IMHO.

I had written a huge blob of crap about how games are designed for short attention spans , but then, thanks to your post, I realised this might indeed be the next-gen of human civilization. After all, progress ought to be geometric. If you keep a slow pace these days, a hundred other people will have come up with same idea, perhaps even faster. Big competition -> higher pace -> lower attention span -> bigger competition.

 

[Wintermoot]

last time I checked you cant "get" ADHD you are born with it

 

[Shycte]

That's why I'm glad I'll be a gamer parent. I'll be making use of the parental controls.

Then you'll be just as happy as the family in the Kinect commercial! You better start collecting Polo Shirts though, they disappear from the stores just as quickly as they got there, damn em' tennis players, damn em' all!

OT: Well, I guess that it all comes down to the parents, if your kid's not doing well in school, don't let him play until he get his grades back up!

But then again, what do I know?...

 

[hyperdrachen]

Ah yes ADHD, the amusing label put on kids with no discipline by the millions. Instead of being reserved for the few actually afflicted. ADHD is a real disorder but when i was in grade school, the teachers were "diagnosing" kids with it. I actually had my 2nd grade teacher, tell my parents, that I needed to be on ritalin.

Wow teaching second grade with a psychological medicine degree seems like such a waste. Oh.. your an english major? Interesting.

Cross referencing statistics? Seriously? Is this what passes for "study"? Yeah kids who spend 10 hours a day obsessing over halo, 7 sleeping, and the other 7 thinking about halo while theyre supposed to be doing something else probably are not real good at paying attention. I can sub in anything for the world halo though. Football, guitar, oil painting, math. Congratulations, you've "strongly suggested" the mind has limited resources and when they're spent on one thing they're not available for others. Grant money well spent.

Vector Sigma...

 

[Steft]

Its funny to look at the modern day society and see that people wants to have something they can blame. People look in the newspapper and see that a gamer killed 20 people or something but they dont see that he was doing drugs and stuff like that.

Students wont focus in schools so they find something to blame.
for what i have experienced myself (being a normal kid in school) its not only the gamers and tv watchers who does not consentrate but the most of the class.

People just blindly blame the games and not the fact it is boring if you do the same thing over and over again and thats what it feels like in school.

 

[Pendragon9]

It's reality's fault for being so boring.

 

[gamer_parent]

Wow. Ok, I guess I shouldn't really be surprised at how spectacularly poorly this article would be received here, but are you all just that bad at reading comprehension? Or is it simply, and more likely, that over half of you didn't bother to actually read the study in question, or even the OP's summary of it?

First off, to the few people still chanting "correlation does not prove causation": yes, we know, they know, they explicitly said that, thanks for identifying yourself as a perfect example of a gamer with attention problems. Moving on...

Slightly less obvious, but still baffling, is how so many people are reducing the conclusion of the study to "kids are bored by boring stuff and interested by games, DURHURR!" That is not what the study says. No, it's not. Read it again: it says compared to non-gamers, kids who play for over 2 hours a day have an increased tendency to have attention problems. The comparison is the key point, the entire reason for the study to exist. Of course kids aren't going to be as interested in school as they are in playing games; games are designed to be fun, that is their purpose, whereas teachers struggle (sometimes successfully) with making school fun, or at least tolerable.

Lastly, 67% is a huge correlation factor for a sociological study. Trends with correlations of 30% are still taken seriously, that's just a matter of fact when dealing with random human populations. I know this to be true because my mother is a social worker, and I used to laugh whenever I'd read a correlation factor in some journal article she'd read, because (as a chemist) I'm used to seeing R-squared values of 0.95 and greater.

I believe that, as a community, we've all become so accustomed to rejecting any claims that gaming may have any negative effects on children (or society in general) that we'll brush off any seemingly legitimate concerns as propaganda meant to destroy our hobby. Really, what was the take-home message from this study? That children shouldn't play more than 2 hours of games a day. Is that really so apocalyptic that we can't even consider that there might be some legitimacy to this study?

We've all turned into fanbois for gaming, blindly defending the hobby at the drop of a hat without even realizing what we're defending it from.

THANK YOU.

I swear, reading this thread is like watching slow train crash with reading comprehension.

As a teacher, I'll say this is largely true. We try to make things as interesting as we have time for. Several problems, however, are inherently going to hamper our attempts:

1) What is "interesting" to you, me, and someone else may vary WILDLY. There's not enough time in the day to do it each person's "way."

2) Some topics aren't exciting at all, at least to some people. That doesn't mean it's not necessary for them to learn it. It just means they can't rely on novelty or games to make the task easier.

3) Kids have to learn how to do things they don't like. They have to learn to function in environments where THEIR enjoyment, or indeed their comfort, are not the priority.

4) We have a mistaken belief that imagination and creativity are the opposite of a controlled learning environment that places limitations on the student. If you really watch people, you'll find that freedom STOPS creative thinking far more than it promotes it--give a child complete freedom, and they'll do largely the same thing every time. And yet every single invention mankind has ever seen was a reaction to a LIMITATION placed upon the inventor--the limitation is what led to the creative breakthrough.

I fully agree with this. All of it. But especially #2 and #3.

Example, I'm not sure how many of you are business majors or have had to take mandatory business classes to graduate with a degree, but here goes. One of those classes that I had take in college to graduate was financial accounting.

Say what you will, no force on earth is going to make finance accounting fun. Not even relating Enron or Arthur Anderson stories is going to make it fun. And yet, it is one of the most fundamentally classes you must take if you want to even contemplate a career that crosses with finance.

The fact that kids are all clamoring about how fun in school should be a mandatory requirement before they are willing to learn is outright ridiculous to me. Maybe I'm just acting like an old fart but c'mon now guys. We really need to be better than this. A little maturity on the subject matter can go a long way in proving to the outside world that we're not quite as juvenile as they paint us to be.

 

[hyperdrachen]

*snip*

I agree that there is a tendency to write off anything thats an attack on gaming or its effects. But my problem here is actually the method of the study. You cited 30% correlations are taken seriously and this one is abnormally high. I still see that as a problem with our methods of investigation. The fact that it's a commonality does not fix that.

No suggesting limiting gaming to 2 hours a day is not apocolyptic but the conclusion isn't really the problem with this article. It's the premises.

The video game industry is essentially constantly under social attack. Linking it to everything from violence to obesity. These excuses for studies, especially ones that are just built ontop of other statistics, might seem harmless enough in thier own suggestions but when you see them presented as a giant stack of "evidence" when california goes to the supreme court demanding tighter regulations on video games and thier content you might change your tune.

You think the people jumping this article's shit are bad at reading comprehension, or lashing out to defend thier preconcieved notion? I'd have to say reading alot of these posts I'd agree. Do you think most of the people who would vote for a federal regulation commitee on video games are any diffrent?

Thier data has no real control group. One is only apparent because video games are seen as something fundamentally diffrent to obsess over. To narrow thier conclusion to video games the study would have needed to include data from people who spend alot of time on other single activities and compare thier attention outside those activities. The only one they included was TV, and they got similair results. Which "strongly suggest" my belief that spending a ton of time focused on one thing is not good for your overall versatility.

The article acknowledged all these gripes but to quote(loosley) Pulp Fiction:

Vincent: "Have you ever heard the expression that once a man has admitted to wrongdoing he is absolved of all blame?"

Jules: "That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard, who ever said that never had to clean up brains on account of your dumbass!"

Acknowledging the shortcomings of your study does not make them disappear.

So yeah I see your position against the "haters" as pretty damn defensible. However this is yet another submission in the long line of statistic based faux-research used to make the manilla envelope "in favor of federal regulations on gaming" thicker. I hope parents take more responsibility for helping thier kids become well rounded members of society, and prudent limits on video games, and everything else are a part of that. But I don't want to see this type of research, which i have no respect for, find its way into real lawmaking.

 

[Kavachi]

My parents aren't that strict with me, and I break the two hour a day limit easily. Especially when I start doing stuff like borderlands or L4D2 with my friends, for those multiplayer games are very time consuming. And geuss what? I'm a straight B student