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May 12, 2019 03:34 pm

Brain Scans Reveal A 'Pokemon Region' In Adults Who Played As Kids

"By scanning the brains of adults who played Pokemon as kids, researchers learned that this group of people have a brain region that responds more to the cartoon characters than to other pictures," reports the Verge. "More importantly, this charming research method has given us new insight into how the brain organizes visual information."For the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers recruited 11 adults who were "experienced" Pokemon players -- meaning they began playing between the ages of five and eight, continued for a while, and then played again as adults -- and 11 novices. First, they tested all of the participants on the names of pokemon to make sure the pros actually could tell a Clefairy from a Chansey. Next, they scanned the participants' brains while showing them images of all 150 original pokemon (in rounds of eight) alongside other images, like animals, faces, cars, words, corridors, and other cartoons. In experienced players, a specific region responded more to the pokemon than to these other images. For novices, this region -- which is called the occipitotemporal sulcus and often processes animal images -- didn't show a preference for pokemon. It's not that surprising that playing many hours of Pokemon as a kid would lead to brain changes; looking at almost anything for long enough will do the same thing. We already know that the brain has cell clusters that respond to certain images, and there's even one for recognizing Jennifer Aniston... The results support a theory called "eccentricity bias," which suggests that the size of the images we're looking at and whether we're looking at it with central or peripheral vision will predict which area of the brain will respond.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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