It would be interesting to see something like this repeated over larger age groups. I'm not entirely convinced that this is an adaptation that you would only see while the brain is still...
It would be interesting to see something like this repeated over larger age groups. I'm not entirely convinced that this is an adaptation that you would only see while the brain is still developing. Unfortunately the small scope of the study (11 participants, 3 female, who begun to play Pokemon between the ages of 5 and 8) makes it impossible to draw any conclusions on this front.
The authors discussed this during the results section of their paper:
Third, previous research has shown that learning contextual and semantic features of novel objects in adulthood (for example, this object is found in gardens) can influence VTC representations.
Regardless, I do think it's interesting to think about how early exposure can fundamentally inform how structure forms. We often hear about how early childhood experiences influence famous people in their respective careers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright being heavily influenced by Froebels blocks, but we don't always consider that this early exposure may be critically important to influencing how people think and why diversity is so important within any particular field.
That being said, neural plasticity exists throughout a human's lifetime to an extent we don't really see in other animals, and in fact modern science is looking into how to better influence this with tools such as trans-cranial magnetic stimulation or drugs that enhance neural plasticity such as LSD in order to more quickly train individuals (TMS accompanied by flight training for pilots, for example) or un-train individuals (MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, for example). I think this warrants further exploration if for no other reason than to see how much structure is influenced by the experience and how much is due to it happening during a critical development age.
It would be interesting to see something like this repeated over larger age groups. I'm not entirely convinced that this is an adaptation that you would only see while the brain is still developing. Unfortunately the small scope of the study (11 participants, 3 female, who begun to play Pokemon between the ages of 5 and 8) makes it impossible to draw any conclusions on this front.
The authors discussed this during the results section of their paper:
Regardless, I do think it's interesting to think about how early exposure can fundamentally inform how structure forms. We often hear about how early childhood experiences influence famous people in their respective careers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright being heavily influenced by Froebels blocks, but we don't always consider that this early exposure may be critically important to influencing how people think and why diversity is so important within any particular field.
That being said, neural plasticity exists throughout a human's lifetime to an extent we don't really see in other animals, and in fact modern science is looking into how to better influence this with tools such as trans-cranial magnetic stimulation or drugs that enhance neural plasticity such as LSD in order to more quickly train individuals (TMS accompanied by flight training for pilots, for example) or un-train individuals (MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, for example). I think this warrants further exploration if for no other reason than to see how much structure is influenced by the experience and how much is due to it happening during a critical development age.