The is really interesting:
The neuroimaging study's participants were all healthy 18- to 30-year-olds with no history of playing video games.
West and Bohbot first established if subjects were response learners or spatial learners by having them run a virtual maze on a computer.
Spatial learners were identified by their tendency to find their way via landmarks such as a rock, a tree or a mountain. Response learners, on the other hand, tend to navigate through remembered sequences of left and right turns.
The participants were then divided into two groups: one played first-person shooter games for a total of 90 hours, and for the same amount of time, the other control group played 3D-platform games, which require players to navigate in a virtual environment by remembering previously visited locations.
Brain scans conducted on the participants before and after the experiment looked for differences in the hippocampus between players who favour spatial memory strategies and so-called response learners — that is, players whose way of navigating a game favours a part of the brain called the caudate nucleus, which helps us to form habits.
The study says 85 per cent of gamers who play six or more hours a week have been shown to rely more heavily on this brain structure to find their way in a game.
...
West pointed to the inclusion of GPS and way-finding markers in many current action games as examples of potentially problematic features.
"These type of markers, we hypothesize, encourage people to ignore landmarks and follow routes that recruit and rely on the brain's rewards system," he said.
So it was a proper study of non-game-players, and they found particular strategies that lead to this. Sounds like these people keep playing on the same game boards so the way they go around the map becomes very habitual, lacking use of high-level memory and navigation. It becomes a primitive action-reward experience.
I could never write the following with a straight face " healthy 18- to 30-year-olds with no history of playing video games".
How can a non-Amish person make it to 30 without ever being introduced to a game by a friend? These are people without friends, and without the curiosity to try out games on their own. They are not healthy.
>play six or more hours a week
that's a lot of time in front of the tube. people need to get out and experience life.
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