Bigger brains succeed at video games!

Well this throws the cat among the pigeons. In an intruiging study that probably prompts more questions than it answers, a paper published in Cerebral Cortex, reports that nearly a quarter of the variability in achievement seen among men and women trained on a new video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three structures in their brains. Sounds fantastic! However, I have not read the full paper so I am not clear on the size of the difference in performance and whether actually a quarter of the variability is very much or not. Also, what about the other 75% of the variability?

One of the researchers describes the findings:

The researchers found that players who had a larger nucleus accumbens did better than their counterparts in the early stages of the training period, regardless of their training group. This makes sense, Erickson said, because the nucleus accumbens is part of the brain’s reward center, and a person’s motivation for excelling at a video game includes the pleasure that results from achieving a specific goal. This sense of achievement and the emotional reward that accompanies it is likely highest in the earliest stages of learning, he said.

Players with a larger caudate nucleus and putamen did best on the variable priority training.

“The putamen and the caudate have been implicated in learning procedures, learning new skills, and those nuclei predicted learning throughout the 20-hour period,” Kramer said. The players in which those structures were largest “learned more quickly and learned more over the training period,” he said.

So far, impressive. OK – lets take a look at this game……

was this study done in 1983?

Hmm, thats not what I had in mind when I read the headline. ok. I am a little underwhelmed. Is that fair?

The researchers claim that the ‘variable priority training’ method used in one of the conditions encourages flexibility in decision making – that can be transferred to skills in everyday life. When I think about the complexity of movement, judgement and social skills utilised in many modern online console games, then this rather simple task seems trivial. I’d like to see a study conducted in modern rich 3D environments which are more simulative of human behaviour and context to see the results.

Further to this then obvious extensions of the study are to examine brain changes over time. So does repeated practice on the variable priority training task enhance performance and does this show up in the brain measurements.

Then considering other genres of games. One would hypothesise that reflective strategy games such as Civilisation, or creative games such as Little Big Planet would engage different cognitive skills and thus show different effects.