Q&A with LSX Fellow Andrea Goldin on Video Games, Sleep, and Kids

You’ve done a good bit of research on the relationship between school start time and academic performance during adolescence. Why do you see this as an important area of study?

Neuroscience research suggests that sleep, nutrition, playtime, and exercise influence learning. Sleep enhances all phases of memory processing and, conversely, poor sleep is associated with adverse consequences for health, wellbeing, and cognitive and academic performance, and can result in major learning deficits.

Especially during adolescence, students typically arrive sleepy for morning classes. As adolescents are more nocturnal than children or adults, they get sleepy later. And, as schools start very early in the morning, adolescents end up getting much less sleep than they should. One might think that the increased nocturnality is due to the excessive use of technological devices. While, of course, cell phones do not help, there is also a biological reason. One part of our brain works as an internal clock; among many other things, it tells us when it is time to sleep. The expression of internal timing is called chronotype. And it turns out that chronotype is progressively delayed during adolescence. As a result, older adolescents usually get sleepy later than younger adolescents. As school starts at the same (early) time for everybody, students get poor sleep.

Can you also talk a bit about the research you’ve conducted about using video games to improve executive function in kindergarteners?

Since 2008 we have been developing MateMarote, a non-commercial computerized platform to stimulate and promote essential cognitive abilities through game playing. We have investigated MateMarote’s impact on typically developing four- to eight-year-olds. For a span of one to four months children played on computers or tablets for about 15 minutes, one to three times a week. We verified a positive impact across different cultures (Argentina, Uruguay, and Spain). MateMarote games improved cognitive capabilities of the entire classroom compared with control groups playing other games. These cognitive skills are required to learn math or literacy.

Our current challenge is to upscale and include MateMarote in the curricula so teachers can integrate the use of this tool into the classroom as a complement to their teaching. We aim to reach many more children, personalize each intervention, and support teachers’ practice and the unique development of each child’s cognition to improve their learning possibilities.

What other research are you currently working on related to neuroscience and education that might interest our readers?

Since 2008, I have dedicated my time to educational neuroscience and run several research lines on children, adolescents, and adults. My main question relates to the transfer of knowledge to real-world contexts: what do we actually learn that’s useful for everyday life while we are practicing something else? All my research has an applied side as my true personal objective is to use science to impact society and help make a better world.

We are examining the effects of video games on cognition and psychosocial aspects in children and adolescents, as well as the transfer of those effects to other aspects of their lives. We have found that certain video games have a positive influence on cognitive capabilities, such as executive functioning, attention, memory, decision making, and mathematical abilities. However, we also identified that playing other popular video games was associated with an increase in aggressiveness and risk-taking behaviors, accompanied by a decrease in prosocial behavior. We usually assume that this would be the case, but until this review nobody had tested these hypotheses.

What have you learned during your fellowship that policymakers need to know?

I am sure policymakers would benefit from the two main activities that LSX requires: listening more and leaving one’s comfort zone. After working with four people from different backgrounds than my own and who come from different realities, I think my main message is to enjoy the process and try to learn from those differences. Addressing the same problem from very different angles is extremely enriching. I believe I learned how to talk to diverse people and to listen and try to understand very different points of view and ways of working.

It might seem obvious that it’s important in interdisciplinary work to talk about everything, including roles and expectations, and to never assume that the other people are on the same page as you. I only truly realized that after experiencing a prolonged creative process with extraordinary and diverse people in this fellowship. I could not have had an experience like this without LSX and I am very grateful.