
A recently published study found that achievement in a video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three specific structures of the brain. Intrigued by something he noticed about gamers, Kirk Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, decided to investigate why expert game players tend to have improved measures of attention and perception, but when training novice game players, those measures could not be improved, even over 20 hours of practice. His theory was that novice players couldn’t learn because the veteran players had specialized brains, and he put this to the test in his latest study. The study may in the future be a stepping stone to understand how the social benefits of social gaming attract players of different types.
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