The global sigh of relief was almost audible when a study last year found kids who played video games for hours every day had no worse mental health than non-gamers. In fact, they came out ahead on some cognitive measures.
“Video Games May Not Rot Kids’ Brains After All,” one of the many news stories about the research trumpeted. Another headline declared: “Video games could improve kids’ brains.“
Now it turns out the study, titled “Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children,” was so flawed it had to be retracted and republished. The updated results show gamers did actually score significantly worse on things like attention and depression, although some of their performance metrics were still slightly better than among non-gamers.
According to the republished article in JAMA Network Open:
Video gaming may be associated with small but improved cognitive abilities involving response inhibition and working memory and with alterations in underlying cortical pathways, but concerns about the association with mental health may warrant further study.
The study made headlines across the globe, but has been cited just twice, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Studies about the effects of video games are often contentious, as we’ve reported before, and this one appears no different. According to the April 10 letter to the editor that serves as the study’s notice of retraction and replacement, a reader informed the authors of several errors in their work, which caused them to make extensive corrections.
The letter offers a detailed explanation of five key errors, many of which stem from a failure to include, properly account for, and analyze differences between the study’s two groups. There were also errors in the way the study presented data and results, for instance results related to how children performed on two cognitive tests. While the original study found that the children who played video games did better at both tests, a reanalysis showed that they did notably worse on one test and about the same on another compared to children who didn’t play video games.
Even after the corrections, the authors note that children who played video games still performed slightly better on the study’s motor and memory tasks.
However, the revised abstract notes that “the Child Behavior Checklist behavioral and mental health scores were higher in VGs , with attention problems, depression, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder scores significantly higher in the VGs compared with the NVGs [non-video gamers].” This contrasts with the original study, which claimed that these scores “were not significantly different” between the groups.
Bader Chaarani, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont, told Retraction Watch:
As you may have noticed, our main findings and conclusions in the updated version of the article remain unchanged. The most relevant correction is that some of the mental health scores are found to be significantly higher in videogamers, whereas in the original version we stated that mental scores were higher in videogamers without reaching statistical difference. However, these scores remain far from clinical significance. The errors occurred mostly in the table of demographics, mainly because some of the co-authors involved in the analyses used inconsistent lists of participants.
Neither Chaarani nor any of the paper’s other authors have had any previous papers retracted, according to Retraction Watch’s database.
Annette Flanagin, executive managing editor of JAMA and JAMA Network, told us:
As the authors report, a reader reported concerns that prompted the authors to identify and correct errors in their analyses and findings. This is the standard process for such errors that, when corrected, result in changes in some findings and the study is considered valid. The authors provide detailed explanations in their Letter, which is published as a notice of retraction and replacement.
Frederick P. Rivara, the editor-in-chief of JAMA Network Open, did not respond to an email from Retraction Watch.
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