| Abstract No.: | A-D1139 |
| Country: | Canada |
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| Title: | THE EFFECTS OF VIDEO-GAME EXPERIENCE ON THE CORTICAL NETWORKS FOR INCREASINGLY COMPLEX VISUOMOTOR TASKS. |
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| Authors/Affiliations: | 2 Joshua Granek*; 1 Diana Gorbet; 2 Lauren Sergio;
1 University of Waterloo, Toronto, ON, Canada; 2 York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
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| Content: | Introduction: It has been shown that highly skilled performers show different patterns of brain activity in simple motor tasks; however, the effects of experience on brain activity during complex tasks have yet to be characterized. Our research considers the general problem of how one makes a visually guided reach under situations where the spatial location of the visual target is dissociated from the location of the required motor output (ie.,“non-standard mapping”). Previous work in our lab has demonstrated that the pattern of cortical activity varies with progressively non-standard visually-guided reaches (Gorbet et al. 2004), and that elite athletes show differences in their ability to learn and perform non-standard motor tasks (McCullough et al. 2006).
Objective: Here we ask how the control of non-standard reaching is different between elite and non-elite level performers, by examining the effects of heavy video game experience on the patterns of cortical activation.
Materials and Methods: Twenty-six right-handed male adults (13 “gamers”, 13 controls; ages 20-28) participated in the study. BOLD fMRI was performed using a 4.0 Tesla scanner. Subjects lay supine in the bore with their heads flexed forward approximately 30º. A plastic screen was suspended vertically at a distance that allowed subjects to directly see and touch back-projected targets. An interface was created which allowed subjects to control a joystick using their right index finger. Four bend sensors were sewn into a thin glove which subjects wore on their right hand. Subjects performed instructed-delay reaching to visual targets using both their eyes and right hand. In the finger conditions, subjects looked at the cued target and directly moved their finger either towards or 180º away from it. In the joystick conditions, subjects looked at the cued target while they displaced a cursor to the target. The cursor providing finger movement feedback that was either veridical or 180º rotated. In two control conditions, subjects were asked to either fixate on the central target or move only their eyes towards the cued target.
Results: While preparing for a nonstandard visuomotor transformation, experienced video gamers rely on increased input from the prefrontal cortex, while the controls rely more heavily on activation within the premotor and the primary motor and sensory cortices.
Conclusions: The results suggest an alteration in weighting of activation within the cortical network for processing visually guided movement in nonstandard situations. These results extend previous studies on the efficiency of cortical networks for visually guided motor tasks by skilled performers.
References:
Gorbet, D, Staines, W & Sergio, L. (2004). Brain mechanisms for preparing increasingly complex sensory to motor transformations. Neuroimage, 23(3), 1100-1111.
McCullough KL, Granek JA, Sergio LE (2006) Visuomotor skill performance asymmetries related to sex and athletic experience. Soc. Neurosci. Abstr. # 242.2.
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