nature neuroscience

Study: Harnessing fMRI neurofeedback to enhance attention and cognitive potential

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fMRI_neurofeedback

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Real-time brain feed­back reduces atten­tion laps­es (News at Princeton):

“In an arti­cle pub­lished online Mon­day by the jour­nal Nature Neu­ro­science, researchers at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty describe a study that shows train­ing peo­ple using real-time feed­back from their own brain activ­i­ty can reduce the fre­quen­cy of atten­tion laps­es and improve their abil­i­ty to sus­tain atten­tion. [Read more…] about Study: Har­ness­ing fMRI neu­ro­feed­back to enhance atten­tion and cog­ni­tive potential

Gaming Your Way to Better Vision (Research Executive Brief)

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(Edi­tor’s Note: this puzzleis one of the Research Exec­u­tive Briefs that includ­ed in Sharp­Brains’ mar­ket report. We asked lead­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tists to share find­ings and impli­ca­tions from their own recent pub­lished sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies in order to bet­ter fore­cast the devel­op­ment tra­jec­to­ry of emerg­ing appli­ca­tions for cog­ni­tive health and brain fitness.)

Brief pre­pared by: Bjron Hubert-Wal­lan­der, Bjorn & Daphne Bave­li­er, Bave­li­er Brain & Vision Lab, Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.

1. Main findings:

Over the past ten years, research con­duct­ed by our lab and oth­ers has shown that play­ing fast-paced, action-packed videogames can lead to sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits in how well one pays atten­tion and how well one sees. Specif­i­cal­ly, our stud­ies have shown that train­ing for as lit­tle as ten hours on action video games (like Medal of Hon­or, Call of Duty, and Unre­al Tour­na­ment) can lead to mea­sur­able enhance­ments in our abil­i­ty to spread our atten­tion around the visu­al field, our abil­i­ty to keep track of mul­ti­ple mov­ing objects, and our abil­i­ty to pick out rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from a rapid sequence of visu­al events. Most recent­ly though, we have shown that action videogame train­ing can also pos­i­tive­ly affect more basic aspects of vision such as our abil­i­ty to resolve small details or see faint patterns.

Pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature Neu­ro­science in 2009, one of our stud­ies com­pared two groups of col­lege-aged males, those who had a his­to­ry of play­ing action videogames and those who had very rarely or had nev­er played videogames at all. By ana­lyz­ing both groups’ per­for­mance on a task designed to [Read more…] about Gam­ing Your Way to Bet­ter Vision (Research Exec­u­tive Brief)