MR Shows Video Gaming Reorganzies Brain

Reorganization of the brain's cortical network in young men with considerable experience playing video games gives them an advantage performing other tasks requiring visuomotor skills.

The study's findings were published in the October 2010 issue of the journal Cortex. Researchers from the Center for Vision Research at York University (Toronto, Canada) compared a group of 13 young men in their 20s, who had played video games at least four hours a week for the previous three years, to a group of 13 young men without that experience. The subjects were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and asked to complete a series of increasingly difficult visuomotor tasks, such as using a joystick or looking one way while reaching another way.

"By using high resolution brain imaging [fMRI], we were able to actually measure which brain areas were activated at a given time during the experiment,” said Dr. Lauren Sergio, associate professor in the Faculty of Health at York University. "We tested how the skills learned from video game experience can transfer over to new tasks, rather than just looking at brain activity while the subject plays a video game.”

The study found that during the tasks the less experienced gamers were relying mainly on the parietal cortex (the brain area typically involved in hand-eye coordination), while the experienced gamers revealed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain. The finding that using visuomotor skills can reorganize how the brain works offers hope for future research into the problems experienced by Alzheimer's patients, who struggle to complete the easiest visuomotor tasks.

Lead author Dr. Joshua Granek added that, in the future, it would be interesting to evaluate if the brain pattern changes are affected by the type of video games a player has used and the actual total number or hours he has played, and to study female video gamers, whose brain patterns in earlier studies were different than those of males.

Related Links:
Center for Vision Research at York University