Video games, like rock and hip hop before them, are sometimes blamed for all the evils that befell the youngsters of the planet but rarely is serious science employed to really study the effects that video games have upon players. Now a study that was published on the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that those children who are playing a lot of video games might actually be actively hurting their attention spans.

The study was been put together by Edward Swing, who is a doctoral candidate at the Iowa State University, and included 1,323 students from elementary schools that were watched for more than one year. The findings are that those who have played video games for more than two hours during each day on average have attention issues that manifest themselves at home and in the classroom. Apparently the same correlation is found in those children who watch television for the same amount of time. The new study does not imply causation between attention deficit and videogames, but it will not be long before someone misquotes it to make that point.

A smaller study was conducted at the same time on college students, with the findings similarly showing that spending a lot of time with television and video games can lead to problems with attention capacity. The published study suggests that parents should limit the time that children are spending with video games in order to make sure that they are not affected by attention deficit disorders.

The study says, “Others have hypothesized that because most television programs involve rapid changes in focus, frequent exposure to television may harm children’s abilities to sustain focus on tasks that are not inherently attention-grabbing”. The author appeared on CNN and elaborated, saying, “It wouldn't surprise me if children who have attention problems are attracted to these media, and that these media increase the attention problems.”