BRAIN PLASTICITY THROUGH THE LIFE SPAN: LEARNING TO LEARN AND ACTION VIDEO GAMESDAPHNE BAVELIER, C. SHAWN GREEN, ALEXANDRE POUGET AND PAUL SCHRATER

Rishav Raj AgarwalArpit Agarwal

BENEFITS OF ACTION GAMEREALLY?

VISION

Action videogame play enhances spatial resolution

temporal resolution

sensitivity.

Crowding acuity

COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS

Benefits social cognition Enhanced task-switching abilitiesEnhance mental rotation abilities

DECISION MAKING

Speeds up reaction time Young laparoscopic surgeons

who are gamers outperform more seasoned surgeons

Game play does not result in trading speed for accuracy

CAUSALITY

Hawthorne effect

Effects of action video game play are causal or are instead reflective of population bias

LEARNING TO LEARN

RESOURCES

All tasks require subjects to make a decision based on a limited amount of noisy data

Enhanced resources: Benefit from greater attentional resources

Divided attention: The ability to divide attention between tasks or locations

Sustained attention and impulsivity.

Flexible resourse allocation

LEARNING RULE

Action game play leads to more accurate probabilistic inference

Action game playing may act by enabling more generalizable knowledge through various abstractions

VGPs show greater suppression of distractors under extremely high load conditions

Development of more generalizable knowledge as one is faced with new tasks or new environments.

CONCLUSION

Action game play does not teach any one particular skill

Increases the ability to extract patterns or regularities in the environment

Learning to learn

Changes in knowledge produce benefits only to the extent to which new tasks share structure with action video games.

REFERENCES

Bavelier D, Achtman RA, Mani M, Foecker J. 2011. Neural bases of selective attention in action video game players. Vis. Res. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2011.08.007

Bavelier D, Levi DM, Li RW, Dan Y, Hensch TK. 2010. Removing brakes on adult brain plasticity: from molecular to behavioral interventions. J. Neurosci. 30:14964–71

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