There’s an article on CNet about measuring the size of a few areas of the brain, and comparing them to your success at different aspects of playing a specific game. This was a study done at UI by a host of research groups.
Researchers found that players with a larger caudate nucleus and putamen did best on the variable priority training, while players who had a larger nucleus accumbens did better than their counterparts in the early stages of the training period, regardless of their training group. This was unsurprising, since the nucleus accumbens is part of the brain’s reward center, and a person’s motivation for excelling at a video game includes the pleasure that results from achieving a specific goal.
This sense of achievement is likely highest in the earliest stages of learning, Erickson said: “This study tells us a lot about how the brain works when it is trying to learn a complex task. We can use information about the brain to predict who is going to learn certain tasks at a more rapid rate.”
via Want to be a better gamer? Size matters | Health Tech – CNET News.
The science keeps validating large chunks of A Theory of Fun… The article, though, focuses on size and has an emphasis on a sort of genetic predestination:
Research has already shown that expert gamers outperform novices across several measures of attention and perception, while other studies have found that training novices on video games for 20-plus hours rarely results in measurable cognitive benefits–a contradiction that suggests that brain structure itself, not training, could predict gaming abilities, according to the study.
That would be new research I need to track down, if so — the studies I have read repeatedly mention the brain’s plasticity and the measurable effect that training has.
