New Study On Brain Size and Game Skill Released
sullivansmith January 20, 2010 - 6:05 pm
If you’re particularly good at multiplayer in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, it may not be due to hours of practice and training. It may have to do due the size of your brain.
This is according to a study by the journal Cerebral Cortex, published by Oxford University. According to the study, the area of the brain known as the Striatum can affect motor and learning skills – two elements to success in gaming.
The study, performed at the University of Illinois, consisted of people who played less than three hours of video games a week. After MRI scans, they were divided into two groups to plays Space Fortress, a game designed internally by the university. The first group were told to work on improving their score as they played the game. The second were told to work on improving their skills. Those with the larger brains were shown to improve their skills more efficiently as the study progressed.
“This study tells us a lot about how the brain works when it is trying to learn a complex task,” said psych professor Kirk Erickson of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the first authors on the study. “We can use information about the brain to predict who is going to learn certain tasks at a more rapid rate.”
So, if you ever wondered why you just can’t get any better at Halo 3, there you go
Source: ScienceDaily.com
