The debate about the effects of computer games on children has been going on for years. Many parents and teachers worry that children spend too much time with them, and some doctors and psychologists argue that games are harmful to development. Many experts don't agree, and so scientists are trying to find out the real story through experimentation. JAMA Network published an article about how computer games can improve children's working memory and speed up stopping unnecessary actions.

Bader Chaarani of the University of Vermont and colleagues conducted experiments with 2,217 healthy children ages 9-10. Researchers collected data on each child, how much time they spent playing games and generally using computers and smartphones.

The children were asked to take a series of behavioral tests and had functional magnetic resonance imaging at the same time. The n-back tasks were working memory and attention tasks in which the subject was asked to indicate whether he or she had encountered a particular signal some number of steps backward.

In the "stop-signal" task, children had to perform an action on the screen and at a certain point, at the command 'stop' to stop doing it (for example, not to press a button when they had already reached for it).

The authors found that children who played video games for more than 21 hours a week were faster at giving correct answers on all three of the stop-signal, 0-back and 2-back tasks, regardless of gender.

However, the findings of this study have yet to be tested and interpreted, as previous studies have shown that games contribute to impulsivity.