If your childhood involved countless hours spent capturing, training, and battling Pok茅mon, there may be a wrinkle in your brain that is fond of images of Wobbuffet, Bulbasaur, and Pikachu.
Psychologists have identified preferential activation to Pok茅mon characters in the brains of people who played Pok茅mon videogames extensively as kids.
The findings, which appear in the journal , help shed light on two related mysteries about our visual system. “It’s been an open question in the field why we have brain regions that respond to words and faces but not to, say, cars,” says study first author Jesse Gomez, a former Stanford University graduate student. “It’s also been a mystery why they appear in the same place in everyone’s brain.”
A partial answer comes from recent studies in monkeys at Harvard Medical School. Researchers there found that in order for regions dedicated to a new category of objects to develop in the visual cortex鈥攖he part of the brain that processes what we see鈥攖hen exposure to those objects must start young when the brain is particularly malleable and sensitive to visual experience.
While wondering if there was a way to test whether this was also true in humans, Gomez recalled his own childhood and the countless hours he spent playing videogames, and one game in particular: Pok茅mon Red and Blue.
“I played it nonstop starting around age six or seven,” Gomez says. “I kept playing throughout my childhood as Nintendo kept coming out with new versions.”
Gomez reasoned that if early childhood exposure is critical for developing dedicated brain regions, then his brain鈥攁nd those of other adults who played Pok茅mon as kids鈥攕hould respond more to Pok茅mon characters than other kinds of stimuli. And since the Pok茅mon characters from the games look very different from objects we typically encounter in our daily experience, visual theories make unique predictions about where activations to Pok茅mon should appear.
“What was unique about Pok茅mon 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 individuating hundreds of these little, similar-looking characters,” Gomez says. “I figured, ‘If you don’t get a region for that, then it’s never going to happen.”’
A natural experiment
Excited, Gomez proposed the idea to his adviser. “I thought, ‘This is never going to work,'” says Kalanit Grill-Spector, a professor of psychology.
The more they considered, however, the more they realized they had all of the ingredients of a really good natural experiment on their hands: The first Pok茅mon game was released in 1996 and played by children as young as five years old, many of whom continued to play later versions of the game well into their teens and even early adulthood.
The games not only exposed these children to the same characters over and over again, but also rewarded them when they won a Pok茅mon battle or added a new character to the in-game encyclopedia called the Pok茅dex. Furthermore, every child played the games on the same handheld device鈥攖he Nintendo Game Boy鈥攚hich had the same small square screen and required them to hold the devices at roughly the same arm’s length.
This last point, the researchers realized, could be useful in testing a visual theory called eccentricity bias, which states that the size and location of a dedicated category region in the brain depends on two things: how much of our visual field the objects take up, and also which parts of our vision鈥攃entral or peripheral鈥攚e use to view them.
Playing Pok茅mon on a tiny screen means that the Pok茅mon characters only take up a very small part of the player’s center of view. The eccentricity bias theory thus predicts that preferential brain activations for Pok茅mon should be found in the part of the visual cortex that processes objects in our central, or foveal, vision.
MRI testing
Gomez recruited adults who had played Pok茅mon extensively as children. He found 11, including himself and study coauthor Michael Barnett, the lab manager at the time.
When researchers placed the test subjects inside a functional MRI scanner and showed them hundreds of random Pok茅mon characters, their brains responded more to the images compared to a control group who had not played the videogame as children.
“I initially used the Pok茅mon characters from the Game Boy game in the main study, but later I also used characters from the cartoon in a few subjects,” Gomez says. “Even though the cartoon characters were less pixelated, they still activated the brain region.”
The site of the brain activations for Pok茅mon was also consistent across individuals. It was located in the same anatomical structure鈥攁 brain fold located just behind our ears called the occipitotemporal sulcus. As best the researchers can tell, this region typically responds to images of animals (which Pok茅mon characters resemble).
“I think one of the lessons from our study is that these brain regions that are activated by our central vision are particularly malleable to extensive experience,” Grill-Spector says.
Early learning sticks with us
The new findings are just the latest evidence that our brains are capable of changing in response to experiential learning from a very early age, Grill-Spector says, but that there are underlying constraints hardwired into the brain that shape and guide how those changes unfold.
Like a skilled jazz player who spontaneously invents fresh melodies while still respecting the grammar of music, the brain is a master improviser that can create new activations devoted to Pok茅mon characters, but it must still follow certain rules鈥攍ike those regarding objects preferentially viewed with our central gaze鈥攁bout where these category-preferring activations can take place.
For parents who might look to the study as proof that videogames can leave a lasting effect on the brains of impressionable children, Grill-Spector says that our brains are capable of containing multitudes.
“The visual cortex is made up of hundreds of millions of neurons,” she says. “We have the capacity to encode many, many patterns in that stretch of cortex.”
Gomez also notes that all of the Pok茅mon-playing test subjects grew up to be successful adults. “I would say to those parents that the people who were scanned here all have their PhDs,” Gomez says. “They’re all doing very well.”
Funding for the research came from the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service, the National Institutes of Health, and the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging.
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