Remember that study that told you to pull the plug on your kid’s gaming corner if you didn’t want him/her to have the attention span of a dog with its head stuck out a car window? Well, it’s kind of wrong. Or at least, the experimenters in question blew their study way out of proportion and conducted some seriously sloppy research. So say Christopher Ferguson of Texas A&M and T. Atilla Ceranoglu of Harvard Medical School.
First off, the two point out that the study paid next-to-no attention to studies that have found videogames beneficial to attention and cognition. Apparently, it also overlooks "a number of recent studies that contradict their views on the relationship between videogames and aggression." Convenient, no?
Worse still, the study’s measurement system is fatally skewed, only using reports from teachers and completely ignoring outside factors that could contribute to a lacking attention span like home environment, poverty, and parental education.
"All standardized regression coefficients for children in the study are less than .10. This indicates that the overlap in variance between media use and attention is less than 1%. Even taking these findings a face value (setting aside concerns about measures and control variables), these are weak effect sizes without practical significance, effectively no different from zero," Ferguson and Ceranoglu explained.
"In sum, these findings are unable to support the weight that Swing et al. (2010) attempt to place on them, and give no cause for concern to clinicians, educators or parents."
So basically, it sounds like a few researchers wanted to make a splash, but ended up belly-flopping instead. Turns out, the scientific method isn’t composed of a single step that says “tailor your study to give you whatever results you’re looking for,” and the scientific community isn’t composed of blind idiots. So yeah, don’t expect any “This is your brain. This is your brain on videogames” PSAs any time soon.
Not that we’re too surprised, mind you. Any community that can count grinding for experience points/boar tusks for hours on end as one of its main hobbies has to have developed a pretty serious attention span – probably out of necessity, if nothing else.
For those of you who watched the World Cup, you got to see some of the worst officiating in the history of sports with lots of blown calls and questionable judgment. So is it really any surprise that Toshiba's World Cup promotion would be equally controversial?
