Play More Video Games , Get your Brain handle more Hand-Eye tasks !!!!!

New research from Canada suggests that extensive video-game experience prepares the brain for complex hand-eye coordination tasks beyond those tackled in game-playing; so next time you find yourself concerned that perhaps your teenager is wasting time playing video games, consider this: is the experience readying them for a future career as a laparoscopic surgeon?

You can read how researchers from the Centre for Vision Research at York University in Toronto, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the effect of video-game experience on the neural control of increasingly complex visuomotor tasks in young men in the October issue of Cortex, an Elsevier journal.

Lead author and PhD candidate Joshua Granek and colleagues, concluded that the reorganization of the brain's cortical network, that they discovered in the young men with significant video game-playing experience, gave them an advantage not only in playing video games but also in performing other complex visuomotor tasks.

The authors wrote that other studies have suggested that individuals skilled in video game-playing have a more efficient brain network for controlling movement that includes the prefrontal, premotor, primary sensorimotor and parietal cortices.

They said this new study extends and generalizes these findings by "documenting additional prefrontal cortex activity in experienced video gamers planning for complex eye-hand coordination tasks that are distinct from actual video-game play".

For the study, they compared 13 young men in their twenties, who during the previous three years had played video games for at least four hours a week, and were very good at it, to 13 young men who had not.

The volunteers completed a series of increasingly difficult visuomotor tasks, including using a joystick and looking one way while reaching in a different direction. They also completed the tasks while sitting inside an fMRI machine having their brain scanned.

Senior investigator Dr Lauren Sergio, associate professor in the Faculty of Health at York University, told the press that using high resolution brain imaging, they were able to measure which brain areas were active at given times during the experiment.

And she said, rather than just looking at brain activity, they also "tested how the skills learned from video game experience can transfer over to new tasks".

A key result was finding that during the increasingly difficult tasks, the less experienced video game players relied mostly on the parietal cortex (the brain area typically involved in hand-eye coordination), while the brain scans of the experienced gamers showed more activity in the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain.

The researchers wrote that the these changes in activation between extensive gamers and non-gamers are possibly linked to the "increased online control and spatial attention required for complex visually guided reaching".