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Adults who played Pokémon many as children have a brain region that responds preferably to images of Pokémon, according to the results of research done by Stanford psychologists. The results were published online in the journal Nature human behavior.
Jesse Gomez, first author of the study and former Stanford graduate student, was himself a passionate Pokémon player in his childhood. In order to determine whether early childhood exposure is essential for developing brain regions that respond to visual stimuli, the research team performed brain scans on 11 adults Pokémon children aged 5 to 8 between 1995 and 1998, including Gomez himself. Hundreds of images were shown to the tested subjects, some of which Pokémon, and the results were compared to those who had never played.
"What was unique about Pokémon it is that there are hundreds of characters and you must know everything about them to be able to play the game successfully. The game rewards you for identifying hundreds of these little characters of similar appearance, "Gomez said. "I thought, if you do not have a region for that, it will never happen."
Because every child has played games on the Nintendo The Game Boy, with a screen 4.7 x 4.3 cm held at arm's length, allowed researchers to test the eccentricity bias. This theory states that the size and location of a dedicated category region in the brain depend on the amount of visual field that the objects occupy and the fact that these objects are in the central or peripheral vision of the brain. spectator.
The team found that the occiputotemporal sulcus (OTS) of these adults actually responds preferentially to images of Pokémon compared to those who had not played the game. Their brains reacted not only to the original Pokémon red and Blue games but also to the images of the television series. In addition to this, the location of this region of the brain, which generally reacts to animal images, was consistent throughout the world. Pokémon Veterans.
Kalanit Grill-Spector, a professor of psychology at the Stanford School of Human Sciences, said that these findings are further evidence that human brains are malleable and able to change shape based on a visual exposure as early as their young age. "The visual cortex is made up of hundreds of millions of neurons," she said. "We have the ability to encode a lot of patterns in this portion of cortex."
Gomez said in a video posted on Stanford Youtube The results could be helpful as they suggest that visual deficits like dyslexia and blindness could result from the way you see things and the way your brain has been stimulated.
Source: Stanford News (Ker Than)
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