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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."
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.
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.
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.