Striatal Volume Predicts Level of Video Game Skill Acquisition

Kirk I. Erickson; Walter R. Boot; Chandramallika Basak; Mark B. Neider; Ruchika S. Prakash; Michelle W. Voss; Ann M. Graybiel; Daniel J. Simons; Monica Fabiani; Gabriele Gratton; Arthur F. Kramer

doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp293

Striatal Volume Predicts Level of Video Game Skill Acquisition

¹Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
²Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA
³Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL 61820, USA
⁴Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA
⁵McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
⁶Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Address correspondence to Kirk I. Erickson. Email: kiericks{at}pitt.edu.

Abstract

Video game skills transfer to other tasks, but individual differences in performance and in learning and transfer rates make it difficult to identify the source of transfer benefits. We asked whether variability in initial acquisition and of improvement in performance on a demanding video game, the Space Fortress game, could be predicted by variations in the pretraining volume of either of 2 key brain regions implicated in learning and memory: the striatum, implicated in procedural learning and cognitive flexibility, and the hippocampus, implicated in declarative memory. We found that hippocampal volumes did not predict learning improvement but that striatal volumes did. Moreover, for the striatum, the volumes of the dorsal striatum predicted improvement in performance but the volumes of the ventral striatum did not. Both ventral and dorsal striatal volumes predicted early acquisition rates. Furthermore, this early-stage correlation between striatal volumes and learning held regardless of the cognitive flexibility demands of the game versions, whereas the predictive power of the dorsal striatal volumes held selectively for performance improvements in a game version emphasizing cognitive flexibility. These findings suggest a neuroanatomical basis for the superiority of training strategies that promote cognitive flexibility and transfer to untrained tasks.