How Playing Violent Video Games May Change the Brain

violent themselves, but what drives this change? Are they kids simply mimicking what they see on the screen, or could gaming have a more profound effect on their brains, affecting behavior?



To explore that question, Dr. Vincent Matthews and his colleagues at Indiana University, who have long studied media violence, looked at what happened in the brain in 28 students who were randomly assigned to play either a violent, first-person shooter game or a non-violent one every day for a week. None of the participants had much previous gaming experience.

At the start of the study, researchers used functional MRI to scan brain activity in the participants, all young adult men, while they completed lab-based tasks involving either emotional or non-emotional content. The participants were then scanned again while they repeated the same tasks, after a week of playing the video games.     More Read