Video-games: Do they require general intelligence?

Here we test if playing video-games require intelligence. Twenty-seven university undergraduate students were trained on three games from Big Brain Academy (Wii): Calculus, Backward Memory and Train. Participants did not have any previous experience with these games. General intelligence was measure...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers and education 2009-09, Vol.53 (2), p.414-418
Main Authors: Quiroga, M.A., Herranz, M., Gómez-Abad, M., Kebir, M., Ruiz, J., Colom, Roberto
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Calculus
Cognitive Ability
Cognitive training
Individual Differences
Intelligence
Memory
Stimulation
Tests
Training
Undergraduate Students
Video Games
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Summary:Here we test if playing video-games require intelligence. Twenty-seven university undergraduate students were trained on three games from Big Brain Academy (Wii): Calculus, Backward Memory and Train. Participants did not have any previous experience with these games. General intelligence was measured by five ability tests before the training session. Training comprised 10 blocks of trials (10 trials per block). Ackerman’s (Ackerman, P. L. (1988). Individual differences and skill acquisition. In P. L. Ackerman, R. J. Sernberg, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Learning and individual differences: Advances in theory and practice (pp. 165–217). New York: W.H. Freeman and Company) theory of skill learning was used as a framework for the present study. Results show that playing the Train game increases the correlation with general intelligence across blocks of trials. This is not the case for Calculus and Backward Memory. These findings suggest strategies for designing video-games presumably appropriate to stimulate our core cognitive abilities.
ISSN:0360-1315
1873-782X
DOI:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.02.017