Keep It or Trade It?: Prototype 2 (360)
Keep It or Trade It?: Tekken 3D: Prime Edition (3DS)
Keep It or Delete It? : Mass Effect Infiltrator (iPad)
Keep It or Delete It?: The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day (XBLA)
Keep It or Trade It?: Syndicate (PS3)
Copyright Erickson et al. / Cerebral Cortex Regions studied. 3D images for the segmentations used to identify the nucleus accumbens (orange), putamen (red), caudate nucleus (blue), and hippocampus (green).
Abstract
Video game skills transfer to other tasks, but individual differences in performance and in learning and transfer rates make it difficult to identify the source of transfer benefits. We asked whether variability in initial acquisition and of improvement in performance on a demanding video game, the Space Fortress game, could be predicted by variations in the pretraining volume of either of 2 key brain regions implicated in learning and memory: the striatum, implicated in procedural learning and cognitive flexibility, and the hippocampus, implicated in declarative memory. We found that hippocampal volumes did not predict learning improvement but that striatal volumes did. Moreover, for the striatum, the volumes of the dorsal striatum predicted improvement in performance but the volumes of the ventral striatum did not. Both ventral and dorsal striatal volumes predicted early acquisition rates. Furthermore, this early-stage correlation between striatal volumes and learning held regardless of the cognitive flexibility demands of the game versions, whereas the predictive power of the dorsal striatal volumes held selectively for performance improvements in a game version emphasizing cognitive flexibility. These findings suggest a neuroanatomical basis for the superiority of training strategies that promote cognitive flexibility and transfer to untrained tasks.
So for those who just went “Lol, wut”. He selected 39 non-gamers (10 male, 29 female) and had them play a Asteroids variant called Space Fortress. He then had them split in to groups and gave each of them a goal. This could be getting a high score, or survival time, etc..Then each subject received 20 hours of training on the game and while they played he used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to determine the size of certain brain structures and to determine which parts of the brain were active during game play.
The conclusion was that there was a link between the size of the subjects dorsal striatum and game playing ability. Those with a larger dorsal striatum played better overall and learned the game faster. So now when your kicking ass at a game you can claim “I was born to play” and be correct.
The full paper can be read here along with a link to download the full paper here.
