A lazy day on the couch, watching TV or playing video games, is many students’ idea of a day well spent. What they may not realize, though, is how active their brain is while gaming. Recently, a group of professors at the University and other various institutions conducted an experiment in Champaign-Urbana over a period of four months to investigate how video games and brain activity are related.

Art Kramer, professor of psychology at the Beckman Institute, led the experiment. “We’re using a video game to mimic learning in the real world,” he said.

The research focuses on measuring the size of specific structures within the brain to predict how a person will perform on a video game called “Space Fortress.” People with the biggest of those structures are predicted to have a higher success rate when playing video games.

“You can take what is called a structural MRI and you can image the structures of a brain,” said Monica Fabiani, professor of psychology at the Beckman Institute. “You can look at them and highlight specific areas.”

The structures that were studied for this experiment were the caudate nucleus and the putamen in the dorsal striatum, and the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum, Kramer said. These structures are found in the middle of the brain, Fabiani said. They are involved in motor learning and cognitive flexibility, which exhibits how people switch between tasks.

“These structures are important for learning things, especially motor skills, and there are a lot of motor skills in this game,” Fabiani said.

Daniel Simons, also a professor of psychology at the Beckman Institute, said the researchers found bigger is better for video game skills. “The bigger the brain structure, the more likely you were to benefit from training,” Simons said.

Kramer compared this video game simulation to driving a car. When a person learns to drive, he or she must learn to balance priorities. Kramer said this experiment demonstrates shifting priorities as a person may need to in real world situations. The traits he is concentrating on include memory, attention and decision-making.

“Space Fortress” was designed specifically for this experiment. Simons describes the game as a “simple, rudimentary video game that looks nothing like video games people play now.” He said the object of the game is to guide a ship through space and fire at targets.

“The advantage of this particular game is we can actually know a lot about it,” Fabiani said.

Space Fortress has no need to be complicated. Researchers are able to tell who had the biggest brain structure without the game being complex.

Each participant experienced 15 two-hour training periods resulting in a total of 30 hours of video game practice. During these training sessions, those conducting the experiment told each person to focus on a certain part of the game.

“They were instructed how to practice the task,” Simons said.

He referred to this as strategizing, or variable priority training. For example, some people were ordered to focus on individual tasks of the game, such as aiming at targets. Others were told to concentrate on getting a higher score overall.

The professors conducting the experiment confirmed it is effective. Simons said the point is to figure out what types of learning strategies are most effective.

“What is surprising is the volume of a brain structure can predict who will succeed in training,” he said. “These sorts of individual differences predict what you can do.”

The results of this experiment can be used to aid in teaching strategies. Some people benefit from different learning methods than others.

“The assumption is the more the structure is developed, the more it has been used in the past,” Fabiani said. “It can predict future performance.”

Although the findings of these experiments are groundbreaking, Simons said that there are exceptions in every study. Differences in brain size do not explain everything, he said. He continued to say this research may assist in predicting how well a person may do on a video game, but it does not illustrate a perfect correlation, only a generalization. Fabiani also mentioned that the brain is flexible.

“Brain volume does change,” Kramer said.