Brain scans reveal a ‘pokémon region’ in adults who played as kids

Brain scans reveal a ‘pokémon region’ in adults who played as kids

Angela Chen

By scanning the brains of adults who played Pokémon as kids, researchers learned that this group of people have a brain region that responds more to the cartoon characters than to other pictures. More importantly, this charming research method has given us new insight into how the brain organizes visual information.

For the study, published today in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers recruited 11 adults who were “experienced” Pokémon players — meaning they began playing between the ages of five and eight, continued for a while, and then played again as adults — and 11 novices. First, they tested all of the participants on the names of pokémon to make sure the pros actually could tell a Clefairy from a Chansey. Next, they scanned the participants’ brains while showing them images of all 150 original pokémon (in rounds of eight) alongside other images, like animals, faces, cars, words, corridors, and other cartoons. In experienced players, a specific region responded more to the pokémon than to these other images. For novices, this region — which is called the occipitotemporal sulcus and often processes animal images — didn’t show a preference for pokémon.

It’s not that surprising that playing many hours of Pokémon as a kid would lead to brain changes; looking at almost anything for long enough will do the same thing. We already know that the brain has cell clusters that respond to certain images, and there’s even one for recognizing Jennifer Aniston. The bigger mystery is how the brain learns to recognize different images. What predicts which part of the brain will respond? Does the brain categorize images (and therefore develop these regions) based on how animated or still they are? Is it based on how round or linear an object is?