Video game playing is a popular activity which provides a cognitively engaging, sensory rich environment that can lead to cognitive benefits in those …
www.sciencedirect.com
Highlights
- Video game players (VGP) are more accurate and faster in decision-making than non-VGP.
- VGP have increased activity in the brain regions for visuomotor processing.
- VGP have increased directed network activities to the SMA and to the thalamus.
- Brain node and network activities negatively correlate with decision response time.
Abstract
Video game playing is a popular activity which provides a cognitively engaging, sensory rich environment that can lead to cognitive benefits in those who play frequently. How exactly they change our brain to achieve these cognitive benefits has yet to be known. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, we examined the behavioral and brain responses of video game- players (VGP) and non-video game-players (NVGP) during decision-making tasks. In behavioral response, VGP were overall faster by approximately 190 ms and more accurate by 2% than NVGP. In brain response, comparing percent signal changes in commonly activated brain regions between groups, we found that video gamers had increased task-related signal changes in the right
lingual gyrus, right
supplementary motor area (SMA), and left
thalamus associated with improved behavioral response. Directed functional network activities to the right SMA and the left thalamus were also increased. The regional signal changes and network activities of all participants were found to be negatively correlated with decision response time, indicating that higher the node and network activities better the performance. These results provide novel insights into the brain mechanisms that underlie improvements in sensorimotor decision-making abilities due to video game playing.
Summary
To summarize, this study demonstrated that video game players have improved performance on decision-making tasks and that these differences correlate to specific changes in the node and network activities in and across the lingual gyrus, the supplementary motor area and the thalamus. These results indicate that video game playing potentially enhances several of the subprocesses for sensation, perception and mapping to action to improve decision-making skills. These findings begin to illuminate how video game playing alter the brain in order to improve task performance and their potential implications for increasing task specific activity. This study leads to not only a potential method of cognitive training, but also understanding how the training will affect the brain.
