I just found this article on my newsreader for today, and thought it might be of interest to the group. The claim is that playing “Super Mario 64” apparently induces structural brain plasticity, which seems a pretty interesting finding. More interesting is that the experiment used a commercially-available video game, instead of designing a custom testing program.
While it doesn’t delve too much into the psychological implications of the work, it would likely make a good reference for any research that wants to account for structural impacts of video gaming. The article also mentions possible positive benefits for “schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s dementia”.
Perhaps this study could suggest a couple of follow-up studies to flesh out the psychological side of this?
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/268195.php
