No abstract

The hippocampus is critical to healthy cognition, yet results in the current study show that action video game players have reduced grey matter within the hippocampus. A subsequent randomised longitudinal training experiment demonstrated that first-person shooting games reduce grey matter within the hippocampus in participants using non-spatial memory strategies. Conversely, participants who use hippocampus-dependent spatial strategies showed increased grey matter in the hippocampus after training. A control group that trained on 3D-platform games displayed growth in either the hippocampus or the functionally connected entorhinal cortex. A third study replicated the effect of action video game training on grey matter in the hippocampus. These results show that video games can be beneficial or detrimental to the hippocampal system depending on the navigation strategy that a person employs and the genre of the game.

study, we sought to determine whether individuals with greater GPS habits rely more on stimulus-response strategies and less on spatial memory strategies when they are required to navigate without GPS, and whether they have poorer cognitive mapping abilities and landmark encoding. We then performed a three-year follow-up in which we retested a small subset of participants. This longitudinal session served to investigate whether GPS use has a negative impact on the various spatial memory facets over time. Methods participants. Sixty healthy young adults between the ages of 19 and 35 participated in the cross-sectional study. Participants were required to be right-handed and to have no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders, or of alcohol or drug abuse. Additionally, they had to have no history of head trauma followed by a loss of consciousness. At the time of recruitment, participants had to be local regular drivers, defined as driving at least 4 days a week in Montreal, Canada. We had no requirements for GPS use, as the majority of participants used GPS at least once a week. To reduce the potential influence of outliers, we excluded individuals with values three standard deviations away from the mean. We chose this conservative threshold as our sample was comprised of healthy young adults. One outlier was found in terms of lifetime GPS experience. No outliers were found in terms of the other GPS habits we measured, i.e. hours of GPS use since pre-test, sense of GPS dependence, or GPS reliance (see Questionnaires section). Of the 60 individuals who participated, ten were excluded: six were not regular drivers, two were not motivated and did not learn or complete the tasks, one was ambidextrous, and one was an outlier in terms of lifetime GPS experience. Fifty participants were included in the cross-sectional study (18 women, 32 men; mean age: 27.6 ± 4.5 years old; see Table 1 for demographic information). All 50 participants were invited for a long-term follow-up session. This session was unplanned and therefore participants had not initially agreed to return for a follow-up. Given that the sample was primarily undergraduate students, many participants were unreachable or had moved away from the city three years after initial testing, and therefore a small subset of 13 participants (4 women, 9 men; mean age: 28.46 ± 3.93 years old; Table 1) came back for a follow-up assessment (mean delay between pre-and post-testing = 3.23 ± 0.50 years). Men and women did not differ on any of the GPS measures. One participant in the cross-sectional study did not do the CSDLT due to lack of time. At baseline, the longitudinal sample did not differ from the remaining participants in the cross-sectional sample in terms of demographics, GPS variables, SBSOD, or navigation variables (independent samples t-tests: all Bootstrap BCa 95% CI crossed 0; Chi-square test for difference in proportion of men and women: p > 0.05). The Institutional Review Board of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute approved the study and al...