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VR Game Ties Depression To Brain Area
An anonymous reader writes "Science Daily is reporting that scientists are using a VR videogame that challenges spatial memory as a new tool to map out depression in the brain. 'Spatial memory' is how you orient yourself in space and remember how to get to places in the outside world. Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game compared, suggesting that their hippocampi (where spatial memory is based) were not working properly."
Except some people got into depression after being constantly sworn at, TKed and ambushed at spawn point.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
"Teacher, I'm feeling depressed! Can I go play video games?"
When I get depressed it seems to have no effect on my ability to play FPS games and navigate the maps. Many of my friends marvel at my ability to play a map once and have my routes down. Indeed, much or my experience playing these games was while not attending class due to depression.
I can't find my
Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game...
Maybe they just don't give a shit!
"Oh, why bother."
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The actual research was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Here's the abstract:
Can't even be bothered to read the summary, eh? The research used a video game to find out that depressed people are bad at spatial memory. It did not show that playing video games cures depression.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
'Spatial memory' is how you orient yourself in space and remember how to get to places in the outside world. Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly
That's because in space, nobody can hear you scream.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I'm sure that most people have noticed that they don't seem to do as well when they're feeling down. I would try to cheer up by playing a game, but my gameplay would suck, which would further reinforce my annoyed, crappy feeling. A vicious circle.
And the opposite works for me as well - if I'm feeling positive and happy, my perception is that I'm doing better than usual. It's been a while now since I don't play games that often anymore, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't just my perception, and that I really would do better. Better reaction times, faster decisions, and better outcomes.
It seems important to make clear that it is most likely the depression which is causing the measured effect here. This is likely, as Depression generally affects a person's ability to fully perform a variety of tasks. This research seems only to confirm that notion.
Emphasis mine.
I'd like to see an objective rather than subjective test for depression.
If nothing else, an objective test would be useful in convincing potential patients ( and those who care about them ) that the potential patient has depression, rather than just "feels bad" [1]. The results of, say, a blood test vs. the responses on a questionnaire.
This seems like a step in the right direction, but also still seems subjective.
[1] Yes, I know severe depression looks a lot worse than someone who just "feels bad", but if someone is spending hours/days in the fetal position crying, that's kind of a hint. Thinking of detecting depression before it gets that bad.
A Human Right
And what do they ask me to do? Play video games... sigh.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It was actually quite accidental. First they put their gardener, Jobe, into the VR machine. When he got out, they asked how he felt - he said he was feeling a little depressed. One of the researchers made an off-hand comment about how he hated feeling down, and wished the causes of depression could be isolated. Then Jobe told 'em it was part of the hippocampi.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Maybe their game can detect depression, but by posting an article about a videogame on Slashdot and not including a download link (or at least a vendor), you're gonna *cause* angst and depression!
<whine>I wanna plaaaaaay!</whine>
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game compared, suggesting that their hippocampi (where spatial memory is based) were not working properly."
Hello??? People with depression perform poorly at JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING. I call BS...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The hippocampus doesn't only handle spatial memory... it's also the store for contextual memory. (It takes longer to develop than the amygdyla, which is why most people don't remember much of their early childhood years). Given that most depression / psychological problems that aren't hardware in nature appear to be due to a mismatch between contextual memory and the limbic brain's emotional memory that the brain needs to learn to resolve, maybe this isn't much of a surprise.
Although it might explain why eye movement can be used in therapy to reprogram people's responses to trauma.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I've been plagued with depression all my life. It runs in my family. I've been playing with mechanical engineering for 2 years now and never bothered to use AutoCAD. I've always made my designs in my head and transfered them to paper. I'm damn good at it and I would consider my spacial thinking skills to be above average.
Of course, if the game takes long enough, it could be somewhat distracting while the effects of depression work themselves out. The equivalent there would be our drunkard concentrating on some task until they were sober.
They are probably depressed because they cant find where they are going.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Anyone seeding this game?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
That's what I was wondering too. This whole experiment reminds me of a joke: a scientists puts a flea under on a piece of paper and shouts "JUMP!". The flea jumps. The scientist cuts the flea's legs, puts it back on the same piece of paper and shouts "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The scientist concludes, "When you cut a flea's legs, it become deaf."
And here's why:
1. I'm guessing they didn't take experienced FPS players, but people who had to get past a learning curve. Some probably not even interested in that game, or that kind of game in the first place. I.e., people for whom it was basically work, and who had to learn for that work. I can tell you first hand that being depressed and/or demotivated can impact both work and learning _majorly_.
Sorry, every game has a learning curve, even some you'd think are the most intuitive things and made by the greatest designers. Yet get a non-gamer at the keyboard and you might get an enlightening experience. We've had decades of getting the basic notions and reflexes hammered into our heads, they didn't. Someone else once compared it to a "game grammar". We know it, and even tutorials assume that we already know it. Non-gamers have to learn it from scratch.
I'd expect the problems to be worse in some game designed by psychologists with zero game design background.
So, at any rate, they're asking those people not only to play a game, but likely for most of them it's asking them to learn how to play an experimental game. And it'll be a lot of learning, and a lot of concentration and learning involved. In some cases it will take a lot of willpower to get past that learning curve, if it gets into the frustrating range.
Do I expect someone in their darkest depression to make that effort and muster the concentration? Nope. "Oh, why bother." is pretty much the attitude I'd expect there.
2. It's also worth mentioning that depression isn't just some abstract mood, but brings with it a lot of bad thoughts. It's not just some abstract mood indicator, but a shit-coloured set of glasses that tints (and taints) all perceptions, experiences and expectations. (Including those about the games, but also RL stuff.) So those people are not just abstractly "depressed", but people who've had a heck of a lot of bad and depressing experiences lately, and got disappointed a lot lately, by sheer virtue of that depression tainting their perceptions of it all. They'll tend to think about it a lot.
So if the spatial orientation game requires lots of memorizing routes and such, there'll be inherently less mental power available for that. Where a "normal" person might think "ah-ha, I have to go through the corridor on the left to get back", the depressed one may well be thinking "what a piece of crap, I bet I'll get passed for promotion again, and I bet everyone is gossipping about me behind my back too. Why the heck do I even bother? I might as well kill myself now."
Even if they might take refuge in gaming, they'll require a game that can basically turn off those thoughts, or thinking completely. Something which is simple and captivating, and doesn't require much thinking. Definitely not something which requires complex thought on its own.
3. Or, if you will, 2b: motivation. Remember that we're talking people which are already depressed and tend to perceive everything as worse than it already is, including any goals and rewards in the game, and including the payoff of any long term plan. So if the game isn't immediately rewarding and fun, their motivation will sink much faster than everyone else's. If you make them do something as boring and pointless as just jumping and running through a maze, it will just be perceived as even more boring and pointless. If it requires long term memorizing and planning, the distant reward for it better be extremely worth it, or since it'll be perceived as (A) less of a reward, and (B) as a plan likely to fail anyway. And if that perception drops below a certain point, they'll be too demotivated to try h
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Based on the paper at http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/1 64/3/516 I can sort of address these points..
./'s title), it is just a virtual navigation task. They don't say, but I expect it was just using arrow keys to move around the virtual town. Not much learning curve.
(all quotes are from the paper)
1. Correct, no experienced FPS players: "Given a likely relationship between familiarity with video games and the outcome measure, individuals reporting high expertise in video games were excluded"
I am probably not free to copy the whole paragraph about the program, but here's the gist: The program was a virtual reality town. On day 1 subjects got 20 minutes of orientation then 30 minutes navigating around the town to destinations selected by the computer. Their ability to find specific locations was then tested, and if they didn't perform well they got 30 more minutes of practice.
Three days later they got 20 minutes to get used to the program again. Two to four hours later their memory of locations in the town was tested (they were tasked to navigate to a new set of locations, different from the specific destinations used on day 1).
Keep in mind this is not a game (despite
2. They didn't have to memorize many routes. The whole virtual city (from the figure they show) is basically a big, curved X shape with maybe 2-3 other side roads in total. They just had to learn the basic set up of the town so they could go back to a location when asked to.
Regarding the "less mental power", the depressed subjects performed just as well as healthy controls on a spatial working memory task. The distinction is important: the game task tests navigation memory learned over more or less 2-3 days (plus the short refresher on the day of testing), working memory involves manipulating things online. If anything, the latter is probably more challenging (I could be wrong, though, I haven't done the two tasks myself).
3. I dunno, 30 minutes of testing doesn't seem like long enough to really reduce motivation. They must be somewhat motivated in the first place, though, to even show up for the two days of testing.
Or maybe depressed people just hasn't tried hard enough to play the game? Or maybe depressed people are under influence of some drug that makes the game harder to them? Or...
This type of conclusion remembers me the joke of the scientist that put an spider on the table and knocks on the table. The spider runs away. Then, he put the spider back on the table again and again, cutting away one of it's legs everytime and again knocking the table, and the spider runs everytime. Finally, the scientist cuts the last leg of the spider, knocks on the table several times and the spider don't run.
His conclusion: "The spiders hears with it's legs..."
--- Illogical Spock
What this article is implying is that the spatial orientation area is bad and that's why they're depressed. They are implying that one causes the other, which is not necessarily true. there could be other areas and this bad orientation could be caused by lack of some other chemicals that impact this brain region as well.
For i.e., if you find that when you have a migrane you're very bad with light (too sensitive), so does that mean that your headache is caused by bad vision centers?
This story is really depressing. I think I'll go cap some noobs.
Damn, I missed.
from the article:
"Earlier studies showed that people with mood disorders tend to have smaller hippocampi than nondepressed people. Other studies showed that depressed people have memory problems. This study strengthened the evidence of a link between the hippocampus and depression by showing that people with hippocampus dysfunction -- as revealed by spatial memory problems detected by the new video game -- are more likely to be depressed."
the video game helps determine if they have a problem with spatial memory, they may have a problem with the hippocampus, which is an indicator of depression.
Why is it the people who state BS, are always stunningly wrong?
oh wait, that's because you were too busy try to show how smart you are without bothering to educate yourself.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1 did you enjoy playing the game?
2 did you get a sense of accomplishment from achieving the game tasks?
3 would you rather have just stayed in bed?
I kind of doubt spatial awareness problems are linked with depression, like alot of people here my instinctual reaction was, "perhaps the depressed people would rather not be doing this?"
I suffer from clinical depression and I know that when I'm having a bad day. I can barely get it together to read a book. let alone be bothered playing video games.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
On some FPS I just cannot hit as well when I am "down". I can "feel" something is different in term of not being able to intuitively lead the target, that is I just can't "see" the shot.
[ Posting anonymous for somewhat obvious reasons. ]
I lived with clinical depression from middle school through the first half of college. There was a slight seasonal component to my depression, but it never really went away until I finally got professional help.
All my life I've consistently scored in the top 1/2 of 1% for general intelligence. And in fact, I took a standardized test that places me in the top 1/4 of 1% for spatial reasoning during the time when my depression was near its worst: just a few months before I got help.
My personality type is fairly introspective, and I dealt with depression by sleeping 12+ hours/day. I lucidly dreamed of how I wished things would be, and that involved a lot of simulated interaction with the real world. Instead of just *poofing* to a given location, I would imagine flying there. Sometimes my viewpoint was from street level, but other times it was from above the highest rooftops.
In my opinion, any reduction in spatial memory due to depression would have to be caused by lack of observation, or rather a lack of desire to observe the surroundings. But we don't need studies to tell us that depressed people are less observant. I know from experience that when I was most depressed I would stare into space, ignoring everyone and everything I passed. I even stopped being able to recall lectures from memory because I wasn't paying attention. So I suspect that I actually created my mental maps when the depression was not as bad and/or that that I compiled the maps over time from incomplete sets of observations. In other words, I probably was not forming any new spatial memories during the worst of my depression, but my depression did not significantly impair my existing memory.
A decade has passed since all of this took place, but I can still give you fairly accurate 3-D sketches from any viewpoint around any of the school campuses I attended during my depression. This tells me that my depression also didn't cause any long term damage to my existing spatial memory.
My conclusion is that the only affect depression seems to have had on my spatial memory had to have been caused by lack of desire to observe things. But then again, that's basically one of the most obvious symptoms of depression so it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
p.s. If you're currently depressed, don't be too proud to get help.
but the wiley merchat man doesn't bother to hide where he gets his pelt,
he says, and charges for that twice fold-
The debasing form of wich is numbered not is a imp of the perverse, a shadow of it self
It's at this most base that the sheer futility of hiding it's name will be known: Greed-greed to the excess
And yet a wise and prudent merchant will hunt down greed like a tiger might-
I actually came to this conclusion the other day, after performing exceptionally poorly at Day of Defeat. I realized that this was a pattern with me - that when I'm depressed, I just don't do as well. And I also realized why. I wasn't concentrating on the game. I was instead thinking about the things that were making me depressed in the first place. Stress at home, stress from work, feelings of helplessness, all that stuff. The internal running commentary that says "you suck, you wanker" that gets turned on when I'm down. Of course, that didn't help my score any, which of course, fed Mr. Critic even further.
Concentrating harder on the game and blocking out Mr. Critic helped both my score and my mood however.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Being depressed, and discouraged, they didn't give a fuck about playing well.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The abstract says that the task was a hippocampal-related spacial memory task (since it had a delay between initial learning and recall). Does the full article rule out a prefrontal cortex impairment that has an impact on tasks that involve executive control? Was some form of imaging used (such as fMRI) to help localize the deficit rather than basing it on the nature of the task? (I don't have access to the full article)
Spatial memory is probably like the rest of the brain--exercising it helps. How frequently do these depressed folk explore new areas? As in, new physical locations? Compare that to a control group.
Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game
I have found that depressed people perform poorly, period.
Have you read my journal today?
A friend of mine tried it, nearly got himself lobotomized. Don't fuck with your brain. It ain't worth it!
Still, I'm talking from experience. I've been through an episode of depression and demotivation, and I've been known to throw games away in half an hour because I couldn't be arsed to even learn stuff like using the handbrake in an arcade racing game. I can assure you that 30 minutes is _plenty_ to lose motivation in that situation. And 2-3 days is plenty to have your mind occupied with other things, instead of the route you learned yesterday.
Regarding "less mental power", that was maybe the wrong word, but here's what I was trying to say: not that a depressed person is stupid, but that they have other things on their mind. That while a normal person would maybe devote a few more minutes in the evening and some more priority to remembering the route they learned yesterday, a depressed person might go "oh, screw it, it's just another pointless thing that won't work anyway" and retreat back to their own depressing thoughts. So, sure, I'm not surprised that someone would do just as well in a short term task, but worse in a 2-3 days one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So people who feel lost also get depressed? This is news?
or in my case:
play FPS games
have a terrible memory
result:
girlfriend depressed
Now study that science guys!
Maybe they just didn't feel like playing video games?
Blerg.
>Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game compared,
:)
>suggesting that their hippocampi (where spatial memory is based) were not working properly."
I think it suggests they were so depressed they didn't give a shit about playing the game.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I just don't buy that being depressed makes you any less spacially inclined. I've had depression for decades and it hasn't once affected my ability to remember/recall directions, or play videogames. The only difference in playing a game is that when I'm depressed I have lower failure tolerance, where on a good day I could fail a thousand times before getting too frustrated to continue. However, switch to a game that is less competetive/difficult/whatever but have simple goals that can be somewhat easily achieved and is enjoyable, and I'll be just fine. I just don't see much value in this study.
"Results were published by NIMH researcher Neda Gould and colleagues in the March issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry." ...NIMH you say.
Sounds really familiar to that lab that made rats talk and stuff in that book that was later poorly animated.
OK, if you wanted to mod that "offtopic" or whatever, I could understand. But how exactly is a Lawnmower Man reference "redundant" in a story about VR?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand