American researchers are interested in adults who played a lot of Pokémon in their childhood. According to them, this repeated visual stimuli, combined with the number of hours spent in front of a screen, would have activated specific brain regions.
In the 1990s, millions of young children around the world frantically played Pokémon. Many of them even continued afterwards and it would have left traces in their brains. Indeed, according to an American study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviorthis repeated visual stimuli during childhood, combined with the number of hours spent in front of a screen, would have activated specific brain regions.
“We have been wondering for several years why we have regions of the brain that respond to words and faces but not to cars, for example”, explains Jesse Gomez, researcher at Stanford University in California (United States) who conducted the study, as a preamble.
For this study, it is therefore assumed that if the exposure of a young person has a fundamental role in the development of specific brain regions, the brains of adults who played Pokémon as children should respond more strongly to the symbols of the game 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 to play properly. The game rewards you for individualizing hundreds of these similar little creatures,” he explains. -he.
Brains of players familiar with Pokémon responded more to character images
What’s more, most kids played Pokemon on the same small square Gameboy screen. Gomez and his colleagues therefore wondered if focusing on such a small area only used a small space in the young people’s field of vision.
During their study, they therefore followed adults who had played Pokémon intensively during their childhood and others who had not. As the participants underwent an MRI, the researchers showed them hundreds of characters from the game. Unsurprisingly, the familiar gamers’ brains responded more to the images than the others.
“At first I just used Pokémon characters from the Gameboy game, but later I decided to use characters from the cartoon with several subjects (…) even if the characters from the cartoon were less pixelated, they still activated regions of the brain,” Gomez notes.
A brain capable of retaining many different patterns
In addition, the researchers noted that in all participants, an area called the occipitotemporal sulcus (located behind the ears) was activated. It would seem that this region can respond to animal images and animal-like characters as is the case in Pokémon, explains the study.
In conclusion, “brain regions that are activated by our central vision are particularly malleable to extensive experiences”, notes Professor Kalanit Grill-Spector who also participated in the study. As for parents who see this study as proof that video games leave a lasting mark on the brain, don’t panic. Indeed, they should above all remember that the brain is able to retain many different patterns, she reassures.
In March, the magazine 60 Million consumers had already relayed a study of this kind. According to American researchers, video game fans have better performance in certain cognitive tests. Indeed, their spatial, attentional and perceptual cognitions would be more developed than those of others. Nevertheless, not all gaming behaviors are good, warn the researchers. Thus, these positive results were detected in people who played for a short time but regularly. “As with any learning activity, short and repeated sessions are more effective,” it was explained.
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