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Nintendo Brain Games Effectiveness Questioned
nandemoari writes "While Nintendo boasts that its Wii can make you fit, the game company's popular line of DS 'Brain Games' have for some time promised to make kids smarter by challenging them with word puzzles and math formulas. However, a French professor isn't buying the shtick. University of Rennes professor Alain Lieury, a cognitive psychology specialist in Brittany, France, recently studied a group of ten-year-old children playing a variety of mentally-challenging games. Not all were video games, however; Lieury pitted more traditional games (including sudoku, Scrabble, and regular old reading and homework) against Nintendo's popular line of DS hits, including Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and Brain Training. Although he credits the Nintendo DS — one of the best selling consoles of all-time — as 'a technological jewel,' he finds Nintendo's claim that it can actually help kids learn is nothing more than pure 'charlatanism.'"
a professor of cognitive psychology dissed your product?
I saw on a TV documentary that old and infrequently used knowledge can be refreshed easily. Often only an hour of doing something will bring it right back.
For the documentary, they monitored the brains of people that 1) Don't use computers and 2) use them regularly. They were tasked with searching the internet for stuff for 15 minutes. The first group was clueless for about 5 days - then their brains started getting really active. The others had active brains from the start.
Paired with other studies done, this seems to suggest that even if it doesn't help you learn, it certainly reinforces what you've already learned, and brings it back into active use.
I'm starting to picture the brain as a big HDD, and it takes about an hour to swap stuff from it into RAM. :P Then it sits there for a few days, until you need room for something else, and then gets swapped back to the HDD.
One comment already posted below the article is pretty good. I will shamelessly steal it:
"5. Karen | 01.27.09
Just read a SharpBrains blog post that may add some light:
http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2009/01/27/nintendo-brain-age-training-vs-crossword-puzzles/
"As we have said before, Nintendo Brain Age and Brain Training should be seen as what they are: a game. And the construct of one's having a "brain age" makes no sense.
Having said that, the researcher quoted then offers, out of the blue, one of the less accurate statements of our times:
"The study tested Nintendo's claims on 67 ten-year-olds. "That's the age where you have the best chance of improvement," Professor Lieury said. "If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults."
That hypothesis (that something won't "work" on adults because it won't "work" on kids) has already been tested and falsified.
In a couple of recent trials, discussed here, the same strategy game (Rise of Nations, a complex challenge for executive functions), played for the same number of hours (23) showed quite impressive (untrained) cognitive benefits in people over 60 - and no benefits in people in their 20s.
How can this be? Well, we often say that our brains need novelty, variety and challenge - and it should be obvious that those ingredients depend on who we are/ what we do. A crossword may well be new and challenging for a kid, but not for an older adult who has done a million already. A videogame can provide good challenge to an older adult - and probably not to the kid who already spends 5 hours a day playing them."
If you click through to the article this is referencing, though, you see the following:
When it came to memorising, the pencil-and-paper group recorded a 33 per cent improvement, while the Nintendo children were 17 per cent worse.
The article could be clearer in explaining the results.
Math test, degree of improvement over 7 weeks:
Presumably, the kids were all going to the same traditional math classes during this time period, and those classes caused most of the improvement. A better test would be to compare kids playing these games to kids on summer break.
Perhaps the DS games help give kids a desire to learn and an eagerness to take on mental challenges. That would be an immeasurable but invaluable benefit.
The oddest part about this article is the conclusion. After tearing down DS games, the researcher recommends that kids play sudoku, even though pencil and paper games did not produce any better results. This leads me to believe that the researcher had an initial bias against the DS.