A team of researchers from Stanford University in California (USA) discovered that extensive exposure to video games, such as Pokémon, during childhood activates certain regions of the brain.
In the 90s, five-year-olds were already playing Pokémon. Many of them continued to play later versions of the game throughout the years. These games exposed children to the same characters and rewarded them when they won battles or added a new character to the game’s encyclopedia.
Psychologists discovered that these repeated visual stimuli during childhood, combined with the number of hours spent in front of the screen, activate specific regions of the brain. The results have been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior and may help shed light on some of the many questions that remain about our visual system.
“It has been an open question in this field why we have brain regions that respond to words and faces but not to cars, for example,” says Jesse Gomez, co-author of the work.
The role of eccentricity bias
Recent research in monkeys, conducted by scientists at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, showed that regions dedicated to a new category of objects tend to develop in the brain during childhood.
Gomez was interested in testing these findings in humans, so he decided to focus on video game exposure. He recalled that when he was a child, he spent countless hours playing video games, especially Pokémon Red and Blue.
Based on previous studies, as well as his own experience with video games, Gomez theorized that if exposure at a young age plays a critical role in the development of dedicated brain regions, the brains of adults who played Pokémon as children should respond more strongly to Pokémon characters than to other types of stimuli.
“What was unique about Pokémon is that there are hundreds of characters, and you have to know everything about them in order to play the game successfully. The game rewards you for singling out hundreds of these small, similar-looking characters,” the expert clarifies. .
The researcher realized that he had all the ingredients to test the theory in humans.
Pokémon not only exposes children to the same characters repeatedly, but also rewards them after battles. Also, most of the children played the games on the same small, square screen . These factors make the Pokémon experience an interesting way to test for so-called eccentricity bias.
Eccentricity bias states that, in the brain, the location and size of a dedicated category region depends on two main factors: “the amount of visual field that objects occupy” and whether the image appears in our central or peripheral vision. .
The small screen they used to play these games means that it would only occupy a small part of the players’ field of vision.
Following the eccentricity theory, preferential brain activations for Pokémon should be present in the central part of the visual cortex, the area of the brain that processes what we see.
Activation of brain regions
The researchers recruited 11 adults who had played Pokémon extensively when they were younger; Gomez also participated in the experiment. All participants underwent an MRI scan.
The researchers showed hundreds of Pokémon characters. As expected, the brains of those who played Pokémon as children responded more to the images than those who had not played the game as children.
The location of the brain activations for Pokémon was a consistent element among the participants : an area located behind the ears called the occipitotemporal sulcus . It seems that this region normally responds to animal images, and Pokémon characters are similar to animals.
“I think one of the lessons from our study,” says Professor Kalanit Grill-Spector of the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, “is that these brain regions that are activated by our central vision are particularly malleable to extensive experience “.
He adds that the brain is a master improviser. You can create new activations dedicated to Pokémon characters, but follow specific rules in the process. One of them refers to where these activations take place.
Grill-Spector also notes that for parents who may view this study as evidence that video games leave a lasting mark on the brain, they should consider that the brain is capable of containing many different patterns, not just video game characters.
Referencia: Extensive childhood experience with Pokémon suggests eccentricity drives organization of visual cortex. Jesse Gomez, Michael Barnett & Kalanit Grill-Spector. Nature Human Behaviour (2019) . DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0592-8
