Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study finds that playing an action video game results in improvements in visual contrast sensitivity. These improvements do not happen for an equivalent group who played a non-action video game. The contrast sensitivity function (CSF) is routinely assessed in clinical evaluation of vision and is the primary limiting factor in how well one sees. CSF improvements are typically brought about by correction of the optics of the eye with eyeglasses, contact lenses or surgery. We found that the very act of action video game playing also enhanced contrast sensitivity, providing a complementary route to eyesight improvement.

Internet use provides cognitive stimulation and thereby may contribute to the accumulation of cognitive reserve that is proposed to be instrumental for maintaining cognitive health in ageing. As the first study so far, we examined possible gender differences in the relationship between Internet use and subsequent cognitive decline over six years assessed through changes in Trail Making Test (TMT) accomplishment time in 897 older adults. Latent change score modelling (taking into account baseline cognitive level, chronic diseases, age, and central contributions to cognitive reserve through education, profession, and leisure engagement) revealed a significant interaction of frequency of Internet use and gender. More frequent Internet use in the first wave of data collection significantly predicted a smaller subsequent augmentation in TMT accomplishment time (i.e., a smaller subsequent cognitive decline) only in men, but not in women. In conclusion, frequent Internet use may contribute to the accumulation of cognitive reserve. The gender difference noted highlights an advantage for males. While this finding could be interpreted as gender-specific, it may be that the Internet activities males engage in differ from those of females, calling for a fine-grained investigation of Internet-based activities in future studies.

The rise in digital media consumption, especially among children, raises the societal question of its impact on cognition, mental health and academic achievement. Here, we investigate three different ways of measuring technology use-—total hours of media consumed, hours of video game play and number of media used concurrently—-in 118 eight-to-twelve year-old children. At stake is the question of whether different technology uses have different effects, which could explain some of the past mixed findings. We collected data about children’s media uses as well as (i) attentional and behavioral control abilities, (ii) psychological distress, psychosocial functioning, and sleep, and (iii) academic achievement and motivation. While attentional control abilities were assessed using both cognitive tests and questionnaires, mental health and sleep were all questionnaire-based. Finally, academic performance was based on self-reported grades, with motivational variables being measured through the grit and the growth-mindset questionnaires. We present partial correlation analyses and construct a psychological network to assess the structural associations between different forms of media consumption and the three categories of measures. We observe that children consume large amounts of media and media multitask substantially. Partial correlation analyses show that media multitasking specifically was mostly correlated with negative mental health, while playing video games was associated with faster responding and better mental health. No significant partial correlations were observed for total hours on media. Psychological network analysis complement these first results by indicating that all three ways of consuming technology are only indirectly related to self-reported grades. Thus, technology uses appear to only indirectly relate to academic performance, while more directly affecting mental health. This work emphasizes the need to differentiate among technology uses if one is to understand how every day digital consumption impacts human behavior.

In modern societies, training reading skills is fundamental since poor-reading children are at high risk of struggling both at school and in life. Reading relies not only on oral language abilities but also on several executive functions. Considering their importance for literacy, training executive functions—particularly, attentional control has been suggested as a promising way of improving reading skills. For this reason, we developed a video game-based cognitive intervention aimed at improving several facets of executive functions. This game is composed of mini-games that apply gamified versions of standard clinical exercises linked through a game environment with action video game dynamics. Here, in a study involving 151 typically reading children, we demonstrated that after this general-domain behavioural intervention reading abilities, as well as attentional and planning skills, were significantly improved. Our results showed that training attentional control can translate into better reading efficiency, maintained at a follow-up test 6 months later.Skies of Manawak, a video game designed to train attentional control and executive processes, is associated with better reading skills in 8- to 12-year-old children that are maintained 6 months later and higher school grades 12–18 months later.

Significance Recent advances in the field of learning have identified improvement of perceptual templates as a key mechanism underlying training-induced performance enhancements. Here, using a combination of psychophysics and neural modeling, we demonstrate that this mechanism—improved learning of perceptual templates—is also engaged after action video game play. Habitual action gamers or individuals trained to play action games demonstrate perceptual templates better tuned to the task and stimulus at hand than control groups, a difference shown to emerge as learning proceeds. This work further illustrates the importance of the development of improved perceptual templates as a mechanism mediating training and transfer effects and provides a novel account for the surprisingly broad transfer of performance enhancements noted after action game play. The field of perceptual learning has identified changes in perceptual templates as a powerful mechanism mediating the learning of statistical regularities in our environment. By measuring threshold-vs.-contrast curves using an orientation identification task under varying levels of external noise, the perceptual template model (PTM) allows one to disentangle various sources of signal-to-noise changes that can alter performance. We use the PTM approach to elucidate the mechanism that underlies the wide range of improvements noted after action video game play. We show that action video game players make use of improved perceptual templates compared with nonvideo game players, and we confirm a causal role for action video game play in inducing such improvements through a 50-h training study. Then, by adapting a recent neural model to this task, we demonstrate how such improved perceptual templates can arise from reweighting the connectivity between visual areas. Finally, we establish that action gamers do not enter the perceptual task with improved perceptual templates. Instead, although performance in action gamers is initially indistinguishable from that of nongamers, action gamers more rapidly learn the proper template as they experience the task. Taken together, our results establish for the first time to our knowledge the development of enhanced perceptual templates following action game play. Because such an improvement can facilitate the inference of the proper generative model for the task at hand, unlike perceptual learning that is quite specific, it thus elucidates a general learning mechanism that can account for the various behavioral benefits noted after action game play.

Previous work has demonstrated that action video game training produces enhancements in a wide range of cognitive abilities. Here we evaluate a possible mechanism by which such breadth of enhancement could be attained: that action game training enhances learning rates in new tasks (i.e., “learning to learn”). In an initial controlled intervention study, we show that individuals who were trained on action video games subsequently exhibited faster learning in the two cognitive domains that we tested, perception and working memory, as compared to individuals who trained on non-action games. We further confirmed the causal effect of action video game play on learning ability in a pre-registered follow-up study that included a larger number of participants, blinding, and measurements of participant expectations. Together, this work highlights enhanced learning speed for novel tasks as a mechanism through which action video game interventions may broadly improve task performance in the cognitive domain.Zhang et al. present evidence that action video games facilitate learning to learn, the logic being that the rate of learning in new tasks can be increased via certain activities. Compared to a control group, action video game players exhibit a faster learning rate in both perceptual and working memory tasks.

Depressive symptoms are prevalent among young adults, with cognitive theories suggesting that impaired cognitive control contributes to sustained negative mood and depressive symptoms. This study investigated the feasibility and efficacy of a remotely-applied, tablet-based cognitive control video game, Legends of Hoa'manu (LoH), for reducing depressive symptoms in subclinical adults. A randomized controlled trial (NCT05447091) was conducted with 173 participants (mean age 33 ± 11.6 years; 75.1 % female) exhibiting at least a minimal level of depressive symptoms (PHQ-8 ≥ 5). Participants were randomized into three groups: high-dose experimental game (HD_EG; N = 58), low-dose experimental game (LD_EG; N = 61), and high-dose control game (HD_CG; N = 54), with interventions spanning three weeks. The intervention demonstrated high feasibility and adherence (69.5–76.5 % of sessions completed) without direct study contact. Overall depressive symptoms (BDI-II total score) improved across all groups, with a significant main effect of time, but no significant group differences. Still, group differences were found for the cognitive-affective BDI-II subscale, where the HD_EG group showed the largest reduction (4.5 points vs. 2.3 and 2.1 in the LD_EG and HD_CG, respectively). These improvements were maintained at 3-week and 3-month follow-ups. Secondary outcomes, including anxiety and rumination, also improved across all groups. Overall cognitive control performance did not differ between groups; however, significant improvements in inhibitory control emerged exclusively in the HD_EG group. The results highlight the feasibility of this novel, cost-effective, and remotely-applied cognitive control-based intervention. These findings underscore the potential of LoH as a scalable solution for addressing depressive symptoms in subclinical populations. •A cognitive control video game reduced depressive symptoms in young adults.•The intervention was feasible with strong adherence despite remote delivery.•Largest reduction in depressive symptoms (cognitive-affective) in high-dose group.•Inhibitory control (SAAT Impulsive) improved significantly in the high-dose group.

Sign languages used by deaf communities around the world possess the same structural and organizational properties as spoken languages: In particular, they are richly expressive and also tightly grammatically constrained. They therefore offer the opportunity to investigate the extent to which the neural organization for language is modality independent, as well as to identify ways in which modality influences this organization. The fact that sign languages share the visual–manual modality with a nonlinguistic symbolic communicative system—gesture—further allows us to investigate where the boundaries lie between language and symbolic communication more generally. In the present study, we had three goals: to investigate the neural processing of linguistic structure in American Sign Language (using verbs of motion classifier constructions, which may lie at the boundary between language and gesture); to determine whether we could dissociate the brain systems involved in deriving meaning from symbolic communication (including both language and gesture) from those specifically engaged by linguistically structured content (sign language); and to assess whether sign language experience influences the neural systems used for understanding nonlinguistic gesture. The results demonstrated that even sign language constructions that appear on the surface to be similar to gesture are processed within the left-lateralized frontal-temporal network used for spoken languages—supporting claims that these constructions are linguistically structured. Moreover, although nonsigners engage regions involved in human action perception to process communicative, symbolic gestures, signers instead engage parts of the languageprocessing network—demonstrating an influence of experience on the perception of nonlinguistic stimuli.

Audio-visual (AV) associations are central to many aspects of behavior, including the initial steps of learning to read. The acquisition of AV pairings has been explored in individuals with varying literacy skills, including children with developmental dyslexia. Most previous studies examined performance in AV associative tasks looking at the pairings between linguistic auditory material and visual stimuli, thus confounding AV learning with phonological and/or verbal abilities. In the present study, we introduce an AV learning paradigm relying on non-linguistic auditory stimuli and novel visual shapes. We fit trial-by-trial performance and compare the response patterns of 52 Italian-speaking children with developmental dyslexia (DD) with those of age-matched (N = 54) and of younger, reading-matched (N = 51) typically-developing children. All groups showed increasing accuracy across trials, but children with DD learned less efficiently than their peers. These findings suggest that difficulties in forming AV associations through repeated exposure may underlie dyslexia, even when linguistic demands are minimized.

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.